AI outside of work

I’m going on vacation for the next two weeks, so I thought it might be fun to share some of my non-work uses of AI. I hope it’ll encourage you to share too, since swapping personal wins is such a great way to learn. At work, I’m lucky to have a weekly meeting where a bunch of us share what we’ve learned about AI, and that really helps keep me anchored in what’s useful today. For example, I’d been hearing a lot of good things about Kimi K3, so this week I made it (and Posit Assistant) my daily driver. I’m really enjoying it so far: it feels like somewhere between Claude Opus and Fable in terms of intelligence, while being a bit cheaper than Sonnet.

Throughout my examples I’ll talk about Claude, because that’s what I use. But I bet every one of these tasks works just as well in whatever you use, whether that’s ChatGPT, Gemini, or something else.

I now turn to Claude for many problems where I used to use search. I’d already stopped using Google in favour of Kagi; it’s not free, but it feels like a meaningful improvement in quality, and Kagi doesn’t stuff AI summaries down your throat. Overall it feels like search has been steadily declining for the last 10 years, thanks to content creators who chase high rankings with low quality writing in order to make money from advertising. I expect the same content rot will eventually come for AI results, but for now the quality is generally much better.

Here are a few recent questions I’ve taken to Claude, where in years past I would have used Google:

• I like to play computer games in my free time, most recently Hades II, Slay the Spire 2, and Blue Prince. I wanted another game along the same lines: a mix of skill and randomness, and where a session takes under an hour. Claude found me Shogun Showdown, which scratches exactly the itch I was looking for.

• I’ve been learning to sew, and now that I’m past the most basic of basics I wanted to tackle a more ambitious project. Claude was super helpful at both recommending the type of project to tackle next (pajama pants with pockets, and a simple knit t-shirt) and finding me some high-quality patterns to buy (e.g.

https://threadtheory.ca

• ).

• I’ve also been trying to do more gardening (a common thread in my recent pastimes: doing physical things in the real world), but we have these weeds that have these really unpleasant burrs that stick into your clothing and hair. I wanted clothing that would resist them, and Claude both worked out that I needed densely woven synthetic fibres and shortlisted a few options on Amazon for me to buy.

• I was recently at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, helping my friends’ kid shop for swim shoes. I try to spend as little time as possible in malls, so I had no idea which shops to look in. Claude gave me a great shortlist.

• When travelling, I use Claude to generate ideas for things to do. I don’t trust the results absolutely, and it’s not my only source of data, but it’s a great way to get a first take. I’ve spent quite a bit of time refining a prompt that describes the sort of thing my husband and I like to do on holiday, so I can paste it in along with wherever we’re going.

Claude is a useful kitchen assistant. I love it for what we call “chopped challenge”: coming up with a dinner based on whatever is left in the fridge. The recipes are far from perfect, but they get me out of the rut of the things I’ve cooked a million times before. Claude’s also great for adapting a recipe I already have, whether that’s a substitution when I’m missing an ingredient, a variation on an existing good recipe (e.g. vanilla -> banana ice cream), or making taco or Cajun spice blends from their individual components.

I also love to bake, but hate baking by volume, so when I want to try a recipe that’s written in cups I ask Claude to translate it to weights. I’ll sometimes use it to create a recipe from scratch, but since baking requires precision I don’t trust the results. But that said, I also don’t trust a recipe from a random content creator on the web, no matter how many 1000s of words of preamble they write.

I love words and language, and random questions are forever popping into my head. Claude is a wonderful companion for these, because it will happily entertain a question that isn’t quite well-formed enough to type into a search box:

• Creating backronyms, when I’ve fallen in love with a word and I want it to stand for something.

• Pronunciation guides for names I’ve only ever seen written down. I don’t believe this is 100% correct, but it gives me a good starting point, and I also make sure to ask if I’m pronouncing a name correctly.

• Answering random questions like: which birds are also verbs?

• Translation between my Englishes. I sometimes blank on the American (or New Zealand) word for something. Recently I asked someone for a multiplug (the NZ term) and got a blank stare, so Claude had to tell me that Americans call it a power strip.

I also love a well-named file. And maybe you, like me, have to live with someone who doesn’t understand the joy of a directory of correctly named files. Or worse, someone who considers it normal to put spaces in file names. If you’re forced to share a dropbox folder with them, you can now point Claude at the directory, ask it to propose a naming scheme, then apply it, and enjoy the results.

Similarly, I recently received a directory full of meeting minutes that encoded the date in the file name in about five different ways. What would have been a lot of manual fiddling took one prompt, and now I can bask in the simple joy of files named with the one true date format.

The most involved thing on this list is a hobby project: taking scans of old computer books and catalogues (like Osbourne programming books or random Americana cook books) and turning them into something browsable.

Here I’m more careful about the workflow, there are many pages and I want consistent results. I first ask Claude to split the PDF into pages, then write an ellmer script that uses batch_chat_structured() to extract the same fields from every page. Then I ask it to merge all the data into a single JSON file, and then turn that into a single page web app. The agent does the fiddly work at both ends, but the extraction itself yields plain text data with a reproducible script.

I hope some of these ideas are new to you, but I also want to know your non-work uses of AI. So: what do you use AI for when you’re off the clock? Tell me in the comments and I’ll read them when I’m back from holiday.