Every Day, a Little Robot

A Few AI Use Cases for You

I keep low resolution copies of my photos on Google Photos. I just realized the other day that I can type in something like “coffee” in the search bar, and it’ll do its best to find me pictures of coffee. (Or the word “coffee” in photos, as I’ve come to find out.)

That’s AI in action. I didn’t label my pictures and tag them and add all kinds of ways to find them. Google is sifting through all my photos (probably for nefarious and evil AI training reasons) and identifying coffee for me, which is cool, because I can just type the word and out comes a nice hot mug of joe.

Bleep Bloop Bleep

Over the weekend, I redesigned the corporate website for the event company I work for right now. It took me maybe an hour, then another hour to refine. I’m not a web designer. I’m a doofus who can say things like, “Can you please double check that the ‘Request a Demo’ button is actually lined up?” and then the robot comes and fixes it.

Earlier today, I spent 3 hours going back and forth with a robot pretending to be a senior software architect because I wanted to design something rather large and platform-shaped. I needed a whole lot of help and thankfully, I set up my parameters such that the robot didn’t drown me like they sometimes do in their overwrought replies.

That led to another idea that I came up with for what to do after such a conversation (that I’ll leave in the paid section, step by step). Because it dawned on me that my three hours of deep prompt interactions that yielded a multipage software design document might not be something anyone but me and a small team of developers will want to read, but I need humans to read it for approvals.

The One Anxiety I Keep Having

I’ve followed many technology waves over the years, and I’ve never been on the bleeding edge, but I’ve surely been on the leading edge (after the craziest discoveries come the ones that might be more palatable). There’s nothing quite like this whole AI experience insofar as how FAST everything is going.

Some of it is just noise. “Which model outperforms the others?” is not relevant any more. Kind of like in my other passion, photography, at this point it really doesn’t matter which camera company you buy from - they all do it well enough.

But learning the difference between prompting and agentic workflows is like the difference between “can boil water” and “pretty good at creating Peking duck.”

And even more so, knowing when to put the tools to use has become a bit wild, because you’ll start to do a task the old way, and then realize, “This would be much better handled by a robot” at least in some parts of the flow.

We’ll All Get There (If We Want)

You don’t have to use a smartphone. You can opt to stay at your desk to receive calls and emails. You can drive to the office and sit there. Heck, lots of companies ordered their “return to work.”

You don’t have to buy streaming TV services. My oldest kid, btw, canceled almost all their streaming stuff (Spotify, Netflix, etc). They’re going back to digital media players like CDs and mp3 players. Some people are going back to vinyl. Paper books.

Dumb phones have 12 buttons to dial, probably power and “select” and “okay” and that’s probably all of it. Nothing wrong with that choice.

I did a week’s work in an hour over the weekend, and I did the work of maybe 30 people this morning before sitting down to write to you. And more so, I am showing people a few pointers as to how they can reclaim their time for more walks, picnics, car shows.

(There’s more past the paywall.)

Chris…

OTHER PROJECTS I’M DOING:

• Off Screen Life - about getting away from your desk and digital things sometimes.

• Photography as Meditation - mental health and meditation through the use of a camera.

• Building Agents - (new website coming) - AI team augmentation through tools and AI services.