I’ve been quieter on socials again, but this time it’s because I’ve been trying to really hone in on where AI can (and should) work better for me.

As I’ve mentioned before I struggle a bit with the role it plays in my life. It’s already a boon in my work at @Buffer in several ways, and is helping me on a side project or two… but I also don’t want it running my life, and I don’t want it taking away my ability to connect with humans or express creativity.

Here’s what’s been really awesome 🤩

• Having connected all our key work tools to Claude (Slack, Linear, Granola, Notion, Mixpanel, etc.), I can quickly get a download on basically anything going on in the company that I need to know about, in a matter of seconds.
• I constantly remind myself about conversations that happened but forget where they happened. Claude just finds it for me, almost every time, in seconds.
• I set up things3-cli on my laptop & started having Claude Code interact with my to-dos in Things (my app of choice). Now, every Friday when I debrief on all my work happenings in the past week, every actionable item is prepped, with full context from Linear/Slack/Granola/etc., as a to-do in Things.
• Now every morning I ask Claude to review my to-dos for that day and determine what it can simply take off my plate or get started for me. This has unblocked SO much already.
• I’m prototyping so much more quickly and freely, including in some areas of the Buffer codebase itself, using isolated backend environments.

Here’s what’s been messy 😬

• I’ve started opening some PRs in the Buffer codebase, but (as I mentioned a while ago), I tried end-to-end vibe-coding an entire new feature – which was really fun, but I got some pretty candid feedback on the PR (sorry @Martín García 😅 ) which led me to put the whole thing on pause and prep a spec for an engineer to pick up where I left off.
• This in turn has me pretty anxious about the noise I create for my teammates. I’ve definitely found ways to reduce that happening, but I don’t know a good way to solve for this beyond trial, error, lots of communication, and no ego.
• Outside of work, I tried setting up a Paperclip instance (https://paperclip.ing) for my side project, Unstream, and immediately freaked out. It started just…doing things for me that I wasn’t ready for on a project I have very little time to work on. So I immediately shut this down ☠️

Here’s what I’m not touching with AI: my music. Sorry not sorry, that’s a hard line I’m not crossing. Making music, from writing to the intricacies of production, is my special place. It’s where I get frustrations & anxieties out, it’s where I keep a very clear sense of what sounds right to me without anyone else’s opinions mattering. It’s an area of my life that I intend to keep as free as possible from capitalist incentives (such that I even made all my music free-if-you-want).

This is all evolving by the hour for me. What’s changed for you in the last week?