6 Ways I Actually Use AI Every Week (Including One That Made Me a Better Thinker)
There’s a growing chorus that says AI is making us stupider. That we’re outsourcing our thinking, losing our edge, becoming intellectual couch potatoes who can’t write a paragraph or make a decision without asking a chatbot first. I get it. And honestly? There’s some truth in there. If you use AI as a crutch, it will absolutely atrophy the muscles it replaces. But that’s not what I’ve been doing. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been experimenting with AI almost every day, and the six things that stuck aren’t the ones that think for me. They’re the ones that give me back time, save me money, and in one case, genuinely made me a sharper thinker. Here’s what actually works. 1. Travel Planning That Doesn’t Fall Apart on Day Three I travel a lot for work and for the occasional family holiday. The work trips mostly take care of themselves, but family trips? Those take serious planning and logistics, especially with three kids and competing wishlists. I now create custom projects inside ChatGPT for every major family trip. I load in all the context upfront: dates, preferences, dietary needs, budget, the kind of experience we’re after, what the kids will actually enjoy versus what they’ll complain about for the rest of the holiday. Then I use that project as a living travel companion, not just for planning, but for adapting on the fly. Plans changed in New York? Ask it to rework the afternoon. Raining on the day you’d planned for Central Park? Get three indoor alternatives in 30 seconds, tailored to what you’ve already told it your family likes. The key is giving the AI enough context that its suggestions are actually relevant to you, not generic “top 10” tourist traps. It’s the difference between a personal concierge and a guidebook from 2019. 2. Vibe Coding (Without Actually Knowing How to Code) I don’t code. Let me get that out of the way. But I’ve started using AI to build small tools that don’t exist anywhere else, and it’s one of the most unexpectedly useful things I do. The best example: I wanted a visual world map that colour-codes every country I’ve visited, split by work trips, family holidays, and solo adventures, plus a bucket list layer for places I still want to go. Nothing off the shelf did exactly this. So I described what I wanted to Google Gemini and iterated until it worked. It now exports as an image, generates text lists, and I can import previous data from a simple text file to avoid starting from scratch each time. Every feature was added by describing what I wanted in plain English and refining the result. People call this “vibe coding.” I call it describing what you want and being specific enough that the AI can build it. You don’t need to understand the code. You need to understand your problem clearly enough to explain it. A word of caution though. The tools are getting incredibly
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