How I Use AI

Sun Feb 15 2026

Learning and relearning: I use AI primarily for learning. Yes, I know about hallucinations and reliability issues. But as a hyperactive person, I sometimes struggle with complex explanations or dense academic writing. LLMs become my patient tutor, always available, breaking down concepts until they click. When I'm reading something technical and hit a wall, I'll paste the confusing section into Claude or ChatGPT and ask for clarification. It's like having a knowledgeable friend who never gets tired of explaining things differently until you understand. This extends to subjective areas too, like art interpretation. I'll bounce ideas off AI: "I think this piece means X, what's your take?" I know it's not human perspective, but it offers different angles I might not consider. It's like having access to a diverse group of thoughtful people, even when I'm working alone.

Programming and problem-solving: Stack Overflow used to be my go-to for coding questions. Now? I barely visit it. When I'm building mini apps and want to optimize something quickly, I'll paste my code snippets and ask, "How can this be better?" The feedback is immediate and usually helpful. There was one exception recently; Apple's CLGeocoder coder issue. AI couldn't help there because I needed better context. I had to dig through Stack Overflow comments to understand what was happening. Sorry, pattern matching.

And it goes deeper than quick fixes. I use AI (v0.dev) to create skeleton UIs when starting new projects, instead of staring at a blank screen, I describe what I need and get a basic structure to build from. When exploring unfamiliar codebases, I'll feed it to cursor, or paste sections in Claude or ChatGPT and ask AI to explain what's happening, like having a patient code reviewer who never gets tired of questions.

My automation scripts have gotten significantly better since I started using AI to optimize them. I'll take something I wrote months ago and ask, "How can this be more efficient?" Often, I'll get back cleaner logic, better error handling, or suggestions for libraries I didn't know existed. It's like having a more experienced developer review my work, except they're available at 2 AM.

The iteration speed is what really changed my workflow. Instead of getting stuck researching the "right" way to implement something, I can start with a working solution and improve it. When working with technologies I'm not familiar with, I begin by having a conversation with AI, "I need to build X with Y technology or Z API, where do I start?"-- and suddenly the learning curve becomes manageable.