Going All In on AI

AI has been the thing for the last few years. I tried and failed to push it to the side as something that didn't interest me too much. The more I read, the more it made its presence known and persuaded me to try it out.

I danced on the edges of it a year ago: having brief chats with ChatGPT or Claude, experimenting with the image generators or transcription applications as a toy, and then setting it aside or laughing at the results. A year ago, it was a toy, but now it's a powerful tool and I've gone all in on it.

It's a frightening change. With every great technological leap throughout history, the majority of people are skeptical of what that technology can do for them. Few are believers in the possibilities of the technology, and even fewer have access to it. With AI being so cheap and accessible, it is becoming more powerful faster than anything before. The quality of the results is improving just as quickly.

The results people are achieving from the prompts on one platform or the systems they have developed to combine one platform with another have inspired me to take the leap to explore at a deeper level with AI. The main influencer with AI has been a site called Every. Before ChatGPT was released, they focused more on tech and business. Now, they have been pivoting towards AI by writing about it more and also developing their own apps (which are included with the subscription fees).

Because of Every^[1] and other sites, my knowledge of these tools is growing more quickly than any other skill I have developed, whether taught at school or self-taught. Every day, I find myself reading or seeing a new way to apply AI, and wanting to follow that rabbit hole to see what I could do with it.

Like most people, my first experience with an AI tool was an image generator. Then I moved over to the chatbots to use them in some basic ways like proofreading text for an email, translating words into a different language, or asking general knowledge questions rather than doing a web search. Those are more common tasks that I do daily with one of the chatbots available.

Slightly more advanced things I have done:

• Used a chatbot to revise my resume based on a job description and write a cover letter.
• Used the same chat to do a mock interview, asking me a series of questions and then grading me on my responses.
• Used it to help prepare for contract negotiations and develop a strategy by reviewing current and proposed contracts, email correspondence, and other information.
• Used it to help develop proposals for consulting clients by sharing information about the project, discussing pricing strategies, and building out the full proposal.

All those items are fairly straightforward and can be done for free if you're patient. I was hitting the token limits, the restraints in the length of the chat conversation, which made me wait 3+ hours before continuing the conversation so often that I felt I had no choice but to pay the monthly subscription cost. Once that happened, a new world was revealed to me: agentic bots.

Instead of back-and-forth conversations to develop the text I needed, or the information and strategies I could use elsewhere, the agentic bots allow you to tell the AI to create or do something with a digital file (or group of files) while you watch. For example, I had Claude Code help me generate a script that used AI to go through my old blog posts (saved as plain text) to clean up the formatting, grammar, and put it into a different file format that I could upload to my blog. I also used it to help change the look of my site by giving it control over the folder with all the individual files. I told it the look I wanted, how it should function, and then it did its thing. It improved things within minutes compared to the hours it would've taken me, and that was assuming it was possible.

The latest thing I started experimenting with was app creation through vibe coding, the phrase used to describe creating the applications without seeing or caring about the code. I started working on an iPhone app for publishing blog posts, which is almost working now. Then I saw a challenge that I thought would be a lot of fun to work on: create a web app with one prompt.

That led me to build and deploy Media Diet after a conversation with Claude to build the best prompt I could and feed it into Bolt. I'm really impressed with how easy it was to do and how well it actually works. I'll never know if anyone else will use it unless I put it out there. It's very simple to use: enter a suggestion of something you enjoy and you will receive a book suggestion, movie/TV series, and books or blogs to read about that topic, that feeling, or something similar to a piece of media you enjoyed. The recommendations link out to a site to view it (i.e. Amazon, Netflix, Substack).

Very simple to use and free.

Through developing that site and discovering how easy it was to build, I ran into a problem that most creators face: I keep wanting to build more. A lot of my favourite writers/creators are building an arsenal of mini-apps that they can use to help them out with their productivity or creativity. I can't explain how it feels to see something live on the web that I had a hand in creating (or a finger) and being able to use it to satisfy my own curiousity.

This shift to building with AI feels like discovering a new creative language—one where ideas can become reality faster than ever before. It's also unsettling. I'm creating things I couldn't have created six months ago, solving problems with tools I barely understand. There's something both exciting and humbling about that.

What strikes me most is how AI has changed my relationship with possibility. I used to see technical limitations everywhere—things I wanted to create but couldn't because I lacked the skills. Now those barriers feel more accessible. The question isn't whether I can build something, but whether I should.

I don't know where this path leads. Maybe I'll build a dozen more apps that nobody uses. Maybe one will actually solve a problem for people beyond myself. What I do know is that going all in on AI has fundamentally changed how I think about creating, learning, and what's possible. For the first time in years, I feel like I'm riding a wave instead of fighting against it.

The future feels wide open again.

Media Diet - Feed your curiosity

Feed your curiosity