The ai hype has arrived
In 2022 ChatGPT was a gimmick
At release ai was little more than a fancy chatbot. It could make fun cartoon images and you could talk to it, but it didn't do much. The excitement was far beyond the delivery.
That situation has completely reversed.
Now the ai is way more powerful than I could have ever imagined. I use it all day every day and I can tell I'm only scratching the surface.
I'm sure most of you are using ai daily, but if not I urge you to fix that today. The people who are using this are going to solve much harder problems, much faster, for far cheaper, and far easier, than those that don't. You are now in a race.
I want to share a few of my use cases in hopes it's beneficial to you or maybe you can give me some feedback on where I'm missing opportunity.
Bookkeeping
I have a pet peeve with bookkeepers and tax professionals. These are technical fields but the industry is way complicated than they need to be, and maybe it's intentionally complicated because then solving it is profitable. There isn't much incentive for Quickbooks to make this simple.
However, Claude is extremely good at technical tasks...
This year I stopped paying for quickbooks for my media work and for my entire rental portfolio. All I do is dump my statements into Claude and ask it to produce a P&L and a Schedule E and then ask me about unknowns. It takes less than 5 minutes to do this, and can run on a recurring schedule.
An example:
I can't run the entire quilt shop books with Claude just yet - but I'm close. It won't be long before I have no bookkeeper, no CPA, no quickbooks, just the ai.
It's not just bookkeeping though. It hooks direct to my Shopify, my meta ads, my Klaviyo and gives me accurate CAC:LTV ratios, and explains to me where I'm spending my money, and where I should. It's a full time data analyst and data entry person, and that person is improving at their job every day.
Vibe coding
I've made SO many apps with Lovable.dev now. Small stuff like landing pages are easy, and I create email workflows, stripe integrations, database management, all in short amounts of time and without any technical ability
The Beacon
I also made an entire community management app for the War Room
I made a fitness and food tracking app for my wife and I - In one day.
I made an app that crops all photos into the same crop for instagram - A constant pain point for me
Claude Design
I put in a few inspiration websites and Claude redesigned the entire quilt shop. It even coded me every single new section in Shopify to make implementing this design a breeze. Then it outputted the design language in a format that creates brand consistency across platforms (Klaviyo, Canva).
This is a 27 page document....
The time is now
Currently Claude is $100/month for the pro account and I have not hit my max weekly usage yet so I could probably get away with the $20/month membership and still do everything I'm doing.
Lovable is like $250/year.
We are in a moment where these tools incredible powerful cost almost nothing, and this moment will end. It would not surprise me if my Claude usage becomes $1,000 per month or higher.
and if you aren't asking Claude how to solve your problems every day you are missing out on humanity's greatest invention, for no reason.
Also, there are things it can't do
It can't create
The ai doesn't create anything new - it reproduces the average of what already exists skewed towards your goals. This is great for many use cases, but not for originality.
It will trick you with information
Great literature is special. The ai provides an aggregate of average information, but what makes great literature special is it's uniqueness. The ai loves summaries (which will make you dumb and lazy), it will tell you what Anna Karenina is about but it won't give you an experience. People who say that they prefer non-fiction because they want to learn things (I used to do this) don't understand that humans learn best from experiences, not information, and great literature gives you an intense experience. To read Anna Karenina is to intimately experience 4 long years of her life, to live 4 years of tragedy, and to see your errors in hers. The ai can tell you to avoid mistakes, just like my dad told me not to touch the stove. It's not the same.
It will never know what it's like to be human
I don't understand those who use it as a therapist or self reflection. The ai has never cried, lost a loved one, had a broken heart, made a difficult illogical deception, had to apologize for it's poor behavior, or carried guilt - and it will never do these things. It doesn't die, it doesn't get sick, it doesn't worry about wasting it's precious time. So it's decisions and advice will never have the same skin in the game that you do. It is a tool, it is probably the greatest tool that humanity has ever created, but it is a fancy hammer.
What are you building?
I would love to hear what you're making or how you're using these tools because I know I could be doing so much more and I want to steal from you.
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