A brainstorm about monetizing this blog turned into a realization that I'd never once opened the SEO panel on any of it. So I connected Claude to my Wix site and let it read what was actually there. What followed was fifteen posts fixed, an SEO education I never sat down for, and one moment where I checked the work and found every description had been wiped. The part I keep thinking about isn't the fix. It's that I learned the whole thing while doing it, which is why any of i

Last week's post was about how it felt. This one is about what's actually running underneath it: two scheduled tasks, no code, and the specific guardrails that kept it from falling apart the first two weeks. If you want to build something like this yourself, this is the version with the actual mechanics.

I started a new job about a month ago and braced for the usual rebuild, recreating every script and process I'd relied on before. Instead, I connected a few tools on day one. By week two, someone said a name I didn't recognize, and I already had a profile on them. This is what changed when the context showed up before I did.

There was one person I just wasn't clicking with, and I couldn't say why. So I did something a little embarrassing: I had AI build a communication profile of me, then one of them, then compared the two side by side. What came back wasn't dramatic. It was just true, and I hadn't sat with it before. Includes the exact prompt I use to build a stakeholder profile from meeting transcripts.

I'd made fifteen AI use case videos with no script format, just whatever felt right that day. I transcribed all of them, fed them to NotebookLM, and asked if there was a pattern I couldn't see. There was. Six parts, and I'd been using them the whole time without knowing it.

I built this from an actual presentation to a team that didn't know where to start with AI, then found myself using the same idea to teach my eighty-something relative about cryptocurrency. Four specific habits, nothing about better tools or more time, just moving AI earlier in what you're already doing. Pick one and see what happens.

AI tools want to answer. That's their default. But one extra line at the end of any prompt forces a pause that changes what comes back — and sometimes surfaces a question you hadn't even thought to ask yourself. Here's what happens in that pause, and why it's often the most useful part of the whole exchange.

I sat down to update my resume thinking I knew what I'd accomplished. Months of daily journal entries told me otherwise — not by surfacing things I'd forgotten, but by showing me things I was actively doing that I'd never thought to claim. Turns out the gap between what you do and what you say you do is wider than you think. And it has nothing to do with memory.

My phone was 96% full and I was leaving for vacation in a few days. The reason I couldn't clear it was an external hard drive I'd been avoiding for years — 25 years of photos, buried in backups of backups, scattered across 30-plus folders. I gave myself the weekend and let AI do the heavy lifting. It recovered 2,101 photos I didn't know I had — including the full Morocco trip I thought was only 304 photos. The number that mattered most: zero deletions.