TLDR: I use AI for building and automation, building either web-apps or workflows that will save me time from doing tedious, mind-numbing tasks, admin work. I do not use AI to brainstorm ideas, write or curate. In other words, I do not use it to replace a potentially generative conversation with a friend, and I do not use it for anything I myself immediately, actively want to get better at.

I like using AI to:

• Teach myself very specific concepts in relation to something else

  This is most useful when I’m learning something new and I come across a foreign or forgotten concept. For example, when I’m looking into something for work and see a topic I need a refresher on, I will ask claude to explain the concept to me using a simple example and that’s usually enough to understand the relationship between the concept and the larger picture I’m working on. Since it has context on my role within the bank it will always end with how this topic will impact my specific function, liquidity risk. Bridging gaps in my understanding like this has helped me stay in flow while learning.

• Build/automate things at work

  When I needed to build a powerBI dashboard in a limited period of time, I designed how I wanted it to look and then asked claude very specific questions on how to implement my design. This turned out to be a quick way to learn how to use the tool itself.

• Build/automate things in my own life

  I despise meal planning. I find it tedious and draining. So I built a little web-app that helps me plan out our meals every week. It saves us about 30 minutes every Sunday but more importantly, I no longer dread having to do it. Plus I had so much fun designing and building it out. I used claude code for all the implementation and back-end functionality (this needs a lot of work and it’s been helpful having a background in CS). I’ve found that when you provide it screenshots and have it implement one screen at a time it’s fairly accurate, plus it nudges you to test every screen and work on fixes before moving on to the next. I wouldn’t try to one-shot the entire thing.

• Plans for itself

  AI is great at creating to-do lists and plans for itself to follow. This is something I will always do when I start a project - I’ll ramble to claude about the idea, how I want it to look, tools I want to use, what I want to accomplish first, what I want to add later on, and ask it to turn that into a plan instead of me having to type everything out neatly by hand (I use wispr flow for large, detailed prompts). Claude creates a comprehensive plan + checklist, and will update the plan as it goes. This saves me so much time and also saves all the context I had for the project when I started, preserving what I wanted to do with the idea like a snapshot of my thinking.

I do not like using it to:

• Come up with ideas from a blank slate

  I do have to admit I’m kind of cheating by putting this on the list, because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced this is just bad practice as opposed to a bad use case. I’ve tried this more than once and it has never resulted in anything remotely interesting and I should never have expected it to. I think in order to get to a workable outcome you need to have curated a map of ideas you want to choose from and you can then begin to extract a direction. In which case, you need to do all of the thinking and then use AI to shape that into an idea. I’ve seen people do this with brilliant results. When dealing with a blank slate, I much prefer writing or taking a long walk to arrive at the thing myself.

• Write

  The whole point of writing for me is to solidify my learning, understand my thoughts, find the holes in them, and move towards some kind of clarity. It’s a struggle and almost always results in terrible first drafts but both the struggle and the drafts are mine and they will never not be strangely satisfying.

• Curate an experience or a list of any kind

  I would much rather ask people or find other curations by a human being on the internet. Curation is a matter of taste, on which the discourse is vast here on substack. I don’t feel the need to add to it. I simply do not like AI lists.