AI

How I Used AI Today

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

My son is having a birthday and graduating from high school in the span of five days, so Jilly and I thought we’d do something special and get him a joint gift to celebrate both occasions. He’s very much interested in photojournalism and will be entering university in the fall to study communications. We thought a nice DSLR camera would be a the perfect gift.

I don’t know much about cameras or lenses, so I asked Claude for some help. My initial prompt:

I want to buy my son a DSLR camera for his birthday/graduation. You are an expert in photography and photography equipment. Could you help me select the right camera, lenses and bag? I’d like to spend about $X total.

Claude and I then chatted about my son’s photographic interests, his current level of expertise, and several of my purchase preferences/requirements. The output of this conversation was a tight list of three potential camera bodies w/ corresponding lens pairings.

I then asked Claude to find the best deals for two of the options and it returned the top three online retailers for both based on price, service and customer reviews.

After validating some pricing details, I made the purchase. In total, I estimate this approach saved me several hours of research and analysis paralysis, which I am known for when making purchases like this.

The camera kit arrived two days later, we gave it to him on his birthday and he used it for the first time last night to cover his school’s WPIAL title baseball game.

Note: This post is part of an ongoing series called How I Used AI Today, inspired by friend and former colleague Beck Tench who does something similar over on LinkedIn. I’m starting to believe the thinking and narrative around generative AI is becoming too binary. The intent of this series is to keep me publicly honest and intellectually responsible with my use of this emerging technology.

Saturday, May 24, 2025 →

Greg Storey on the binary nature of AI discourse these days:

The assumption that tools passively rewire us, no matter our intent, no matter our context, no matter our discipline, is reductive at best and infantilizing at worst.

Worth a read. This is more nuanced than AI is evil / AI is the future.

How I Used AI Today

Friday, May 23, 2025

I fed Claude some examples of bi-weekly stakeholder updates for products I previously managed. I then asked it to learn the format, understand the tone of the writing, and help me draft a first installment for a new initiative I’m leading. We chatted for a few minutes about the voice I desired, recent progress by the team, and the health of the project. After I provided adequate context, Claude generated a draft for me to review. The initial version was very good and only required a few copy and formatting edits. I was happy with the result and it saved me about an hour this morning.

Note: This post is the first in an ongoing series called How I Used AI Today, inspired by friend and former colleague Beck Tench who does something similar over on LinkedIn. I’m starting to believe the thinking and narrative around generative AI is becoming too binary. The intent of this series is to keep me publicly honest and intellectually responsible with my use of this emerging technology.