AI Learnings
Notes, quick takes, and deeper dives on AI tools, workflows, and things I think are worth paying attention to.
Peak AI Frenzy
You AI everything. You automate all the things. Then you find the checkpoints, realize you overbuilt, and come back down to using less. The comedown is the healthy part.
The only AI advice I actually give people
Use Claude for every task for two weeks, and refuse to route around a single blocker. That's the whole method. The gains compound faster than you'd believe.
Five things in my AI preferences that actually changed my output
Preferences are not a setup step you complete. They're a living system you tune. Start with the heckle rule, which took one line and changed everything.
A task that reports success and writes nothing
Eight weeks of watching my own scheduled AI tasks fail. The one that hid the longest never crashed once.
The handoff doc is the real product
I rebuilt my Research / Plan / Implement skills around one idea: each phase's deliverable is a 200-line baton, not the pile of work behind it.
Build Magic decks by vibes, not by meta
Commander got taken over by win-rate spreadsheets. I use AI to flip it: start with the feeling I want at the table, then let it find the cards.
What chasing 49 AI certifications actually taught me
The badges aren't the point. Working through dozens of certs is just the fastest way I've found to pressure-test a tool instead of trusting the launch video.
I finally won a stock trade. Then I handed the money to the index.
My conviction trades have a perfect record of losing money. One finally worked. The real win was what I did with the profit, and what I chose not to buy next.
The folder system that made AI actually useful
Most people re-explain their entire job to AI every single conversation. The fix isn't better prompts. It's better folders.
Coding is solved. Now what?
Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code) hasn't written a line of code by hand since November. Jenny Wen says the design process is dead. The Lenny's Podcast episodes this month are hitting different.
AI + education is the use case I'm most excited about
I was homeschooled for high school. Personalized AI classroom assistants would have been a game changer for me, and they're about to be a game changer for a lot of kids.
Claude Cowork Mode is the real deal
Been using it to build this site and manage my project roadmap. It's like pair programming with someone who actually reads the docs.
Five tools. That's the whole stack.
I've tried dozens of AI tools. Five survived. Each one does something the others can't.