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by adamtaylor_13 9 days ago
I wanted to document this largely for myself (and because other folks have asked me this question), so I ended up writing a blog post on it: https://adamtaylor.me/posts/how-i-use-ai

I hope that doesn't run afoul of self-promotion rules. I just thought it'd be nice to have this answer somewhere it can evolve over time.
1 comments
atworkc 9 days ago
Definitely appreciate the write-up!

And I think I'm in a somewhat similar place with how I use the tools as yourself.

How do you feel about your workflow, do you feel you're underusing the tooling or overusing it?

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adamtaylor_13 8 days ago
Actually I feel like I'm in the goldilocks zone right now. I've tried automating more for the sake of automation, and didn't really feel any more productive. My workflows have grown naturally as I feel like AI can fill certain gaps, and as I watch other people use AI successfully.
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atworkc 8 days ago
It does feel like an organic process, like I have to intuitively feel the solution for the need I have, can't really use all the shiny things effectively if I don't feel the pain in my bones which they solve.

I've been moving my goldilocks zone a bit towards scheduled tasks simply because I've actually felt the need and pain they solve, more like I have some backburner things I want to take care of but they're so unimportant that I'm unwilling to spend more than 5m here and there thinking about them so I add a scheduled taks every other day which does some leg work, I review for 5 minutes and then forget about it until the next iteration.

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adamtaylor_13 8 days ago
I think you're 100% correct that you need to feel the pain that the agent is supposed to solve. It's like trying to explain to a junior the power of Rails if they've never even built a regular static HTML website. It's going to be very difficult for them to understand why things are the way they are.

I'm very allergic to "solutions just because we can". In fact, one way I use AI that may be slightly not-mainstream is that I use AI to actively pursue subtraction that I couldn't otherwise do: cutting down on all my tools I've built over the years, culling cruft: notes, scripts, comments, etc. until I'm left with a smaller footprint of stuff I know is useful.

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