How I use AI

Nifty tool, but no replacement for a brain.

  • — Written May 12, 2025
    — Updated Nov 19, 2025

    • TL;DR

    YES, I use AI for ideation & code.
    NO, I don't use it for art/ writing.

    None of the media and writing on this website contains AI generations.

    It's become the cop-out du jour to defer the rich and rewarding (albeit tedious) work of thinking and writing to Artificial Intelligence. If you need help expressing yourself through a more eloquent translator for your thoughts, that's fine... but not worth the cost if you ask me. It atrophies your own mind. It lumps you together with every other AI-jockey, not to mention it exposes your deficiencies when you talk to other people.

    When it comes to writing for people, I handle that myself.

    When it comes to code, namely HTML, CSS and JS, I use AI.

    Claude by Anthropic

    Claude


    ChatGPT by OpenAI

    ChatGPT


    Copilot by Github

    Copilot


    The three amigos.

  • Claude is my workhorse and default chat buddy. I prefer to keep him on the Concise setting, more often than not on the latest Sonnet.
  • ChatGPT is my second-opinion; I used it to get out of dead ends and get a fresh view that I could consolidate with Claude's. I sometimes posit the exact same question to both and mesh the results together.
  • Copilot is my on-the-fly reviewer and helper. Greatly makes my life easier in VSCode, base model is Sonnet, followed by GPT. The autocompletes get surprisingly good in time.

    • To the rescue

    Re-learning HTML and CSS to get this site together was a serious production in and of itself, and I found myself throwing my scripts at GPT or Claude for proofreading/ code review anyway. More often than not, the cobbled-together mess I put together from tutorials and snippets was either broken, outdated, or plain lame. Not really a waste of time since I've learned WHAT to ask for more specifically, but the hours spent debugging could have been invested in working on my business.


    Finally realizing that ① I'm not a web developer and it's not really necessary to build this skillbase and ② Nobody really gives a fuck about code as long as it works, I gave myself permission to defer the execution of the code to AIs who could do infinite iterations on it, better and faster than me.


    Wherever I could use a library that did the job, I have; Fancybox needed some particular functionalities spliced into it, like the a-b comparison. The grid system started as a copy of GridOverflow, which was then heavily modified to deal with my obsessive edge-case aspect ratios. SmoothScroll and Tooltip were both reverse-engineered tutorial snippets.

    Here's a method I use to clarify what I need:

  • ❶ Tell the AI that I want to explore a feature, no code yet. I write what I need, in a nutshell.
  • ❷ Specify the constraints and preferences (say HTML+CSS only, JS at a minimum, targeting desktops with HD or 4K screens, needs to work with other modules, etc)
  • ❸ Ask the AI to interview me with 5 questions to find out all it needs to know to draft a version.
  • ❹ After I answer, I tell it to list viable approaches, pros and cons, and keep it concise.
  • ❺ If there's an approach that's clearly the best starter, I'll pull the trigger on it. If there isn't, I'll suggest a mix of the solutions or ask more questions.
  • ❻ If I hit a roadblock, I'll juggle the two most viable approaches between Claude and GPT, a way forward always crops up in the first 2 tries.
  • ❼ Ask for a self-contained testable demo. It's the first round of Quality Control, before I integrate it in my own files.
  • ❽ Iterate, integrate, comment some bits here and there and bump the revision number.

    • I enjoy writing a lot. I touch-type for fun. Working with both ChatGPT and Claude never yielded any paragraphs that I could envy. I got kernels of ideas, absolutely. In fact, that's precisely what I use them for. Self-elicitation. I have interviews with them, roleplay different scenarios, tumble problems on all their sides, and when the idea shows I grab it and take to the pen 'n paper.

    AI for thought.

    Brainstormin' and Spitballin'.

    AI for visuals.

    I'm in the process of writing an article for this; I only use it for wildcard ideas in the concepting process. Not much different than pulling something off Pinterest or Image Search. The cardinal rule is that whatever the output is, I have to process it.

    AI misc.

    Did you know you can have 10 minute Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sessions? They won't fix your life, but it's enough to get unstuck. If you vent or rant at them, they'll be super chill and helpful.

    Where AI sucks: compelling communication.

    Communication is a very personal thing. Good or bad, articulate or clumsy, formal or coloquial, the way you convey what's in your brainbox says something about you. This is where AI falters, since it's an aggregate of available text, all written by other people. The frequency and flavor of expression that got uploaded into that burgeoning library had to be edited and published, so it has to have a modicum of formality. Lord help us if obscure forums and image boards ever get assymiyullayted into that dataset. Remember when Optimus Prime told Sam he learned the language from the World Wide Web? hooo boy. AI is still a bit stiff in the expressive department. All my attempts to produce anything edgy resulted in "How do you do fellow kids" cringefests, or worse, LinkedIn posts.

    It also can't yield cool expressions like sticktoitiveness.

    Where AI rules: self-elicitation.

  • Explain Like I'm 5- just add ELI5 before the prompt and they'll do a great job. I understood declarative vs programmatic methods and how Git works using this.
  • Self-elicitation prompts- tell them to interview you, answering their questions will give you some valuable revelations.
  • Post inspired by Damola Morenikeji
    •