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Not every AI win is a board deck or a finance workflow. Some of my favorites this month are small, slightly ridiculous annoyances that I finally stopped putting up with. Here are three. 1. The recipe that wanted my email address I was cooking over the weekend and pulled a recipe off a website. You know the kind. Scroll past the life story. Scroll past an ad. Scroll past another ad. Find one ingredient. Scroll again. All I wanted was to print the recipe. The site would give me a clean print version without the ads, but only if I handed over my email address first. No thanks. So I opened Claude in Chrome and asked it to read the recipe, make a PDF, and print it. A few moments later I had a clean page in my hand and nothing new in my inbox. It's a tiny thing. It's also exactly the kind of thing that used to eat ten minutes and a little bit of my patience. 2. The camp dates that never seem to arrive We've been waiting months for the dates for a sports camp to be posted. That meant going to the website, checking, finding nothing, and remembering to check again a few days later. Now an agent checks that website every day. When the dates are listed, it tells me. Until then, I don't think about it. What I like most here is what I'm no longer carrying around: the low-grade "did I check?" that sits in the back of your head and never quite goes away. 3. One home for everything travel I keep a travel database. It's my one resource for all things travel, which only works if it's actually complete. Now an agent takes any flight or hotel booking and populates that database automatically. The confirmation lands, the details go where they belong, and I don't have to retype a confirmation number ever again What these have in common None of these is impressive on its own. That's the point. Each one is a small, repeated friction: ads between me and a recipe, a website I have to keep checking, booking details I have to copy by hand. Individually, they're easy to tolerate. Together, they add up to a lot of attention spent on things that don't need me. When people ask where to start with AI, I often suggest looking at work. But it's just as useful to look at whatever annoyed you this weekend. If it happens more than once, and you can describe it in a sentence, an agent can probably take it off your plate What's the small annoyance you'd hand off first? Alex |
As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
Nate B. Jones wrote something last week that I've been chewing on. He described research (from Epoch and METR) where the same Claude model rebuilt a roughly 16,000-line scientific toolkit from its behavior alone, without seeing the code. Then, asked to customize a smaller library, it produced something unusable. Same model. Wildly different results. His explanation: AI improves fastest where results are cheap to check, like proofs and tests. It improves slowest where feedback is slow, like...
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