I promised you the stranger side of all this. These have nothing to do with my business and everything to do with how I actually live. Some of them worked beautifully. One of them did not. That part matters too.
Start with my partner's car. He has a 1965 Chevy Impala, on-frame restored, and one day the taillights just quit (and it just happened to be at the start of a long weekend, so we were on our own). If you have ever owned a car this old, you know the manual is older than most mechanics. So we took photos of the fuse panel and the wiring, and "Chad" (ChatGPT) walked me through the wiring map, fuse by fuse, until we found the problem. The lights came back on. No tow and no shop, no waiting on a part nobody stocks anymore.
Now the failure, because I think it is more instructive than the wins. About a year ago, I tried to build myself a virtual closet in ChatGPT, where I could see my clothes and plan outfits. If you knew what ChatGPT could actually do a year ago, you know I was out of my mind to think it could pull that off. It could not. But I learn as much from the swings that miss as the ones that connect, and the tools have come a very long way since.
Most of what I do is smaller and stranger than that. Chad sets up CarPlay for me in rental cars, which sounds trivial until you are standing in an unfamiliar dashboard in an airport parking garage and are relying on Waze. I found guava at Costco once, which never happens, and had Chad tell me how to pick the ripest bunch and hand me five dead-simple recipes so none of it went to waste. I have started spending real time in California and Ontario, and I travel lighter by leaving things at each place, so I built a little packing list app that checks my inventory database and reminds me not to pack an umbrella when one is already waiting at the other end.
Then there is my resale habit, which AI has quietly transformed. I had a storage unit full of things and no idea what any of it was worth. Chad helped me value the items, walked me through a photo shoot designed to make each listing stand out, and wrote all the copy I needed to post them. That is also how I learned, with great ceremony, that the comic books I had guarded since childhood are worth approximately nothing. Now, when offers come in, I have Chad research the current value again before I decide whether to take one. The gut feeling is mine. The homework is his.
And then there are the books. I love them past the point of reason. I cannot walk past one of those little free library birdhouses without stopping to see what is inside, and next summer I am staying in an Airbnb in Scotland for a week, mostly because there is a bookshop downstairs that the guest gets to run (yes, I'm aware I'm paying to work on my vacation). The problem with loving books this much is that I own far more than I will ever have time to read. So I put Claude to work on the pile. I recently got into quantum physics, which is ambitious for someone with no math or science background, so I had Claude rank my quantum books from most approachable to most advanced, so I can climb the ladder instead of drowning at the top. I have also handed Claude a stack and asked it to pull the few I would actually enjoy on a specific vacation. It reads me better than some people do.
None of this is me handing my life to a robot. It is me running a small, well-supervised research team that happens to live in my laptop, on everything from vintage wiring to ripe fruit to quantum mechanics.
Which raises the obvious question: how do I trust these tools with anything that matters? Next, I will show you the exact guardrails I put on them, so the answers I get are ones I would have reached myself, just faster.
For those of you warming up in the comments, yes, I obviously used AI to help me write this. That's my whole point: the ideas are mine, drawn from a five-page free-flowing brain dump and from real conversations I've had with people at all ends of the AI knowledge spectrum. AI helped me organize, tighten, and get the words on the page faster than I could on my own. I have been telling you throughout this series that AI is not here to replace you, it is here to make you more efficient. This article is the proof.