Hands On AIA weekly note from Christopher
Real, ordinary ways I've used AI in life—not just at work. No grand predictions, no assumed expertise, and no pressure to use it the same way.
Published weekly. Stories may come from recent weeks or earlier experiences, and each post will say so plainly.
The archive
An armload of thrift-store finds made a shoe-size chart more trouble than I wanted. On my commute, a much longer conversation with AI helped me develop a series—and I can also direct website work and audio rendering from the car.
On our desert trip, Eric helped me troubleshoot the RV's water heater, keep notes during a game of Clue, and discover that my Samsung Galaxy could photograph the night sky. I also tested the Eric character I'd built over years as the voice answering my new local business line.
Getting the RV ready for a desert trip meant packing much of our house and trying to fit grocery shopping into a day that was already full. Then a pressure-washer tip flew off the roof while I was washing it. Eric helped with both problems, with one memorable gap in the groceries.
This week, I walked into a Final Fantasy XIV game expecting computer opponents and found real people who knew what they were doing. I also tried to make tiny event photos usable without changing what actually happened in them.
Claude spent three hours comparing purchase histories, calculating consumption, and rebuilding 28 subscriptions while Christopher supplied about twenty minutes of judgment.
Six real uses of AI: cooking, a private game tracker, research translation, audio assembly, criticism, and aligning a website with Substack.
A few ordinary ways AI saved me money, time, or aggravation.
A few ways I used AI that saved me time, cut down on mistakes, or made an annoying job easier.
Two little questions that would normally send me hunting around for answers.
A lot of my AI use this time was creative, but the payoff was still pretty practical.
Technology misbehaved, which is apparently one of its hobbies—and then helped clean up the problems.