How I Actually Use AI

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Honest reflections. Practical frameworks. Lessons learned the hard way, written by someone who's been in the trenches and is still learning.

Whether you're trying to figure out where AI fits into your work or just where to start, this newsletter is here to help you play the long game.

This week…

The question my friends keep asking: how am I actually using AI right now.

The stages of AI grief, the messy way I worked through them, and why you have to be bad at it first.

Let's get to it!

Aaron

Last week we talked about where I find the time. Lately, I’ve invested a ton of time into adding AI into the formula, so this week let's talk about that. Specifically, how you go from frozen to actually using it.

Some of my closest friends from undergrad check in about once a month with some version of this question. What's the latest, how are you using it, what should I be doing. It's a fair question, and one I love getting.

Before I answer it, one bit of throat-clearing. I'd call myself a power user of AI, which is very different from an expert. I am not an expert. Being a power user doesn't even mean I'm using it well. It just means I'm using it, constantly, and learning as I go.

Most people I talk to aren't using it at all yet. They're stuck somewhere in what I've come to think of as the Four Stages of AI Grief:

It's a doom loop. And I think every bit of it is valid, because using AI is a lot like learning a new language. My brain, for the record, is bad at languages. I've been trying to learn French for a year and it's going okay at best. But for whatever reason it latches onto things like Excel and AI.

I landed in that grief loop like everyone else. I broke out of it fast, mostly because I'm a little delusional and convinced I can learn anything. So I just started. I used ChatGPT and Claude for everything, lost some sleep, and kept it stupidly simple at first. Math problems. Editing emails. The easy stuff. The point was never to do anything impressive. The point was practice.

I can remember the exact moment things clicked. Call it the moment I entered the matrix. I realized that most of using AI well is about architecting loops.

Here's what I mean. Say my fiancé and I want to plan a trip to Florida later this year, and I have no idea where to start. I don't need a perfect prompt. I just tell Claude what I'm trying to do and ask how it can help. It does some research, hands back a few directions, and now the loop has started. I react, it adjusts, we go back and forth. Start with something as low stakes as a grocery list for throwing something on the grill this weekend, and once you feel how the loop works, you point it at bigger things.

With a little confidence, I tried building what I'd have called an "agent." One of my first was for a Notion page I used to help manage my Wall Street Prep course. I asked Claude to audit it, reorganize it, then help me keep managing it. It worked, and I got cocky. I know what I'm doing. I'm going to AI my whole life.

So I went full builder, on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Three or four weeks later I had a pile of half-baked projects, none of them actually wired into my work or my life. I'd made a real mess of the “brain” of my Claude. But I'd also learned a ton. That an "agent" is really about automation. That it’s knitted together using tools like Zapier and Relay. And that whenever I didn't understand one of those tools, I could just ask Claude and it’d teach me… or Claude in Chrome could even use the tool for me!

Where I am now is clarity. I know the two or three real automations worth building and plugging into my actual day. So I'm taking a pause, resetting, and rebuilding the foundation with clear eyes this time.

Here's the part I most want you to hear: this took months. Months of building things that didn't work and not feeling like I knew what I was doing. You cannot skip the phase where you're bad at it. If you let being bad scare you out of starting, you stay stuck forever. On the other side of being bad is where new skills actually live.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Start embarrassingly small, and when you get stuck, ask AI to help you get unstuck. It is the rare tool that teaches you how to use it while you use it.

If you want a first move, here it is. Open Claude and type something like: "Hi Claude, I'm new to this. My fiancé and I want to book a trip to Miami later this year. Can you research some options and tell me how you'd help me plan it?" Nothing fancy. That's the whole on-ramp. The loop takes it from there.

I'll go a lot deeper in future issues on the actual agents and automations I'm rebuilding. For now, the only move that matters is the first one.

One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is hearing how these ideas show up in real life.

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