How I Use AI

I’ll share a bit about how I currently use AI. I’ll go through how I use it in my own projects (like this blog) and elsewhere. Expect the usual mixed bag of thoughts.

AI has really made its way into everyday life over the past year — it’s everywhere and people of all kinds are using it, from nerds to regular folks. Before you’d Google something and read a blog post, now you just ask AI directly. Handy, but at the same time those sites where the information actually comes from lose visitors and ad revenue — and that’s not a great thing.

You could write endlessly about this topic, but let’s get to the point: I’m not exactly a power user, but I do use AI to some extent. Here’s a bit about how.

How I use AI #

I pay for a Claude Pro subscription and it’s served me just fine so far. That probably also says something about how much I actually use it, if I haven’t needed to go for a more expensive plan. Let me go through some examples of how I use AI — that’s probably the clearest way to explain it.

Asking AI things #

This is probably the most common use — just asking questions. A lot of people do this. I might ask AI things the same way I used to Google stuff. No need to think too carefully about search terms, I can just ask in my own way. Often I’ll then ask for sources and go check out the actual pages myself. And from there maybe back to good old Google.

AI experiments #

Got to experiment with AI a bit and see how it works. I’ve asked AI to generate silly images and had it add something funny to a photo. These I’ve mostly shared with friends rather than publicly.

One coding-related experiment was building an MCP server for SpottiHinta. This was mainly just for fun — so you can ask AI about the current spot price and it gives you the actual price by fetching it from the MCP server. I wrote about it in SpottiHinta’s announcements (in finnish).

I also briefly tried the hyped OpenClaw, but I didn’t want to go down that path yet and give it broader access to anything. You see a lot of different implementations and what people manage to pull off, but it would require a bit more dedication and a willingness to throw money at various services.

Blogging #

I don’t write full articles with AI. I write them myself. I might brainstorm with AI about an article — like how it could be improved or if it has any thoughts. But even then I make my own edits if it seems like a good idea. I might ask AI for keywords related to an article.

Coding #

Might as well mention vibecoding first. The way I see it, that’s when you code an entire app purely with AI and don’t really do anything yourself. That’s pretty damn dangerous if you don’t actually know how to code and have no idea what building secure apps requires.

I use AI as an assistant. It doesn’t code the whole thing — we work together. It’s an incredibly good helper for debugging and figuring out errors. I can throw an error message at it and it’ll dig into how it could be fixed.

It’s also great for what I’d call “monkey work”. By “monkey work” I mean repetitive, simple stuff — like find all untranslated strings in the code and replace them with translation keys. I actually used it for exactly that when working on translations for Tapaaminen.net.

Various tools and bash scripts are also easy to make with AI. Since bash scripting isn’t really my strong suit, it makes Linux a lot easier to use when I can just ask how to do something and get quite ready-to-use code. I usually read through it and tweak it a bit, but it’s a huge help.

I’ve also asked how a certain feature could be implemented, or just bounced ideas around. It’s almost like talking to another person, except I can ask stupid questions without worrying 😆

I’ve also had it build forms since those damn things can be annoying to put together. So I use AI for assistance and for helping with the annoying stuff. I do still enjoy coding and solving problems that way. The backend is probably my place to be and you can tell that from the frontends on my projects.

Closing thoughts #

I added a general AI page here on the blog where I explain AI usage at a high level. I’ll try to keep publishing stuff in the AI category going forward, so feel free to browse there for more.

On that AI page there’s also a mention of the human.json system, which I’ve also set up. It’s a signal that there’s a human behind the content, not AI.

AI is going to become more widespread in the future and it’ll probably make its way further into my own workflow somehow. I don’t quite know yet how or in what way. There might be things I currently do myself that I’ll hand off to AI — especially if something is tedious and repetitive.

Bottom line — AI is an assistant, not a replacement. At least not yet.

How do you use AI?

This article was first published on my blog in Finnish.

Article image by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash