Hadley Wickham wrote about how he uses AI outside of work and asked how others do. Here is how I do.
I’ll describe some of my many non-work use cases, focusing mainly on ones that are either intellectually stimulating or fun or both. At work I use AI for a lot of boring corporate stuff and some genuinely interesting things like market research in the data science industry. Research is also something I use AI for outside of work, so I’ll start with a few research examples.
Research, aka, the outlet for my insatiably curious mind
For a fleeting moment a few years ago, our daughter showed interest in basketball, so we started watching the WNBA. She quickly moved on to other hobbies. My wife and I stuck with the WNBA and are big fans now. I use Claude to help me understand the game, the rules, the franchises, the players, and the history. As I am prone to do, I use Claude to express it all in a dashboard I update daily as the season progresses and playoffs approach. Tonight we are going to the Indiana Fever vs Dream game here in Atlanta! Kelsey Mitchell, Caitlin Clark, and Alisha Gray are three of the best shooters in the league, so it will be fun to watch them all on the court at the same time. Check out the dashboard to see why.
A second personal research project is right here on this blog. AI’s transformation of work. I use Claude in a few ways here. Though I find most of the source material by scouring the web each week, Claude helps me find more examples of AI transforming work. Claude helps me ingest and categorize all the source articles into a database. Then Claude helps me find patterns, summarize them, write a log, and maintain yet another dashboard. But yikes, have you ever tried to get Claude to write acceptable prose?
Claude is a struggling writer. However, I think using Claude to write certain things is is fine. One is technical summaries. Claude writes the summary of AI’s transformation of work. I do no analysis there, so I don’t want to use my brain space there. I just want a readable summary of facts, grouped into categories. Unfortunately, Claude doesn’t write so well, so I spend a lot of time researching grammar, structure, and other writing concepts in order to develop Claude skills that can edit Claude’s output, in multiple rounds of metaphor wrangling and concept steering, into something acceptable. It’s never great. Most of life is acceptable, not great, so I am fine with this. Fingers crossed that all that research improves my human writing, too.
A third personal research project is birding. Birding intersects well with my lifelong photography hobby. Claude helps me understand bird behavior, weather’s effects on birds, mating and brooding timelines, and which birds are common in my area. I also have Claude use the eBird API to give me stats on the birds I photograph. I end up outside more, doing more of what I love.
Turn technical documentation into helpful casual chat
I use Claude a lot to learn more about apps like Lightroom and Photoshop, for editing my photographs, and Reaper, for editing my field recordings. Claude is even good at helping me troubleshoot camera and audio gear. I only recently discovered field recording. Claude helped me learn the ins and outs of my Zoom F3 field recorder, the 32-bit recording format, and the Clippy XLR EM272Z1 omnidirectional microphones I use to record storms and birds. Speaking of being outside more, here’s a recent recording of a storm with a great lightning strike! If you have headphones, put them on before listening. If you want to know how headphones improve audio listening, ask Claude.
Claude has also been great at helping me figure out cycle-soak settings for my sprinklers.
The drink fridge repair is my favorite technical success with Claude. We bought a cheap one, and its internal regulator died soon. Claude recommended an external regulator and probe used commonly in the brewing industry. It worked perfectly and I got another 6 months of life from the fridge before all of its components finally died. Next time, I’ll just buy a better fridge.
Dear god the school emails
If you are a parent, you know. Connect Claude to your email and have it schedule a daily or weekly report that summarizes emails from your kids’ school. Tally those tardies. Track those assignments.
Finis
There are many more ways I use AI outside of work. I’ll save those for another post. Many of these AI projects get me in touch with other people and out into the world, and for that I am grateful.
Thanks to Hadley for a great post idea, and go read his!