159 | AI Snips & Tidbits: The First Batch
AI Snips and Tidbits is a StrefaTECH grab-bag of quick tips from my AI travels. No big lessons here, just small things I did with AI recently that worked (or surprised me!), shared while they’re fresh. Quick reads, no schedule, hopefully a nugget or two you can use today!
Welcome to the very first batch of AI Snips & Tidbits.1 Today I’m sharing four things I did with AI lately that stuck with me and might be a small inspiration for you.
Helping a family member move into a new house, I had a little plastic doohickey in my hand and wasn’t positive it was what I needed. So I snapped a photo with my phone and asked ChatGPT, which told me it was a wall anchor and started walking me through what to do with it. I hammered it partway in, took another photo, and got back “not quite, needs to go farther.” Tapped it flush, one more photo, and this time a (virtual) thumbs up!
I do variations of this sequence (photo, question, action, another photo) so often now that it’s becoming a habit ... and 9 times out of 10, I’m delighted to have the help.
Claude’s drafts of my articles kept sounding like AI, even after we’d fixed the tells one by one. So I flipped it around. I uploaded a batch of my old articles from before I ever touched AI, and instead of asking what to avoid, I asked what my writing always does: “You are an expert in writing human-sounding articles. Critique this draft and list your suggested changes to make it sound more like me writing it myself. Attached are examples of my early, non-AI-assisted articles.” It named things I never would have (apparently I can’t write three sentences without a parenthetical, which, well ... guilty!). The trick turned out to be giving AI examples of the real you, not just a list of don’ts.
Four of us were on the porch one evening, talking about insects the way you do when nobody wants to go inside yet. Somebody wondered what a fishfly eats, so I asked ChatGPT out loud on my phone ... and it just stayed in the conversation with us. Fishflies to dobsonflies to caddisflies, everybody talking over everybody and doubling back (“no, no, what does a dobsonfly eat?”), and it kept up with every one of us. It even pulled up photos when we couldn’t picture what we were describing. I’ve handed AI plenty of solo tasks, but keeping pace with a rambling four-way porch chat? Did not see that coming!
At the end of a marathon session with Claude, where we’d worked out a pile of new writing rules and a whole workflow, it hit me that all of it would vanish the second I closed the chat. So before I did: “Give me updated complete project custom instructions so I can just replace what’s there.” I pasted the result into my project settings, and now every new chat starts already knowing what took us weeks to figure out. I’m becoming a big fan of reviewing my custom instructions now and again, and having the AI app help me to improve them.
That’s the debut. Four snips, no schedule, and I’ll share more whenever a few good ones pile up.
So how about you ... did one of these spark something you'd try yourself? Tell me in the comments (or at strefatech.info@gmail.com). And as you go poking at what AI can do in your own corners of the day ...
Make Good Choices!
I’m reviving the name “Snips & Tidbits” from a section I wrote for a newsletter that was mailed out quarterly to our Systems Modeling customers about 40 years ago ... which tells you something about either my loyalty to a good title or how long I’ve been at this. (Both, probably!)
It is a good title, and some good tips. Hope to see more of these! Everything is in the details.