How I work with AI

What AI does in my work

Many of my notes, decisions, drafts, and projects live as plain files on my computer, in a vault that Claude Code can access. The AI reads those files and pulls the relevant ones to help me with the task at hand. It organizes, cross-references, transcribes, researches, and drafts against material I gave it. It does the bookkeeping my brain won’t hold anymore.

It does research legwork: finding sources, pulling them in, laying them out for me to judge.

And it does production mechanics: it stages posts into my blog system, edits my videos, keeps my Notion board up to date – and a lot more. A staged post or an edited cut is a draft, nothing more. Between an asset existing and that asset being live there’s work – checking, fixing, deciding – and that work is mine.

What AI never does

It never puts anything live. Nothing goes out under my name that I haven’t verified and made mine – every post and every video passes through my hands last.

It never gets to be my only way into my own knowledge. I keep the files readable, I keep some work fully AI-free, and I make sure I can always find things by hand. The system has to survive the tools changing – or not being available. It’s just files.

And it never interprets sources I’m accountable for. When the claim matters – in client work, in anything scientific – I read the source myself and decide what matters. That’s my job; I don’t rent it out.

How I catch it lying

Nine days into using AI, it invented a scientific reference for me – real author, real journal, completely fake paper. I tell that whole story on the about page. The reflex it left me with is the core of my method:

• Every reference gets checked against the actual source before it’s used. A citation nobody opened is a rumor with formatting.
• If no source exists, the answer is “no source exists.” That’s a result, and it’s allowed to be the result.
• Claims get checked one at a time. A paragraph that “sounds right” has proven nothing.

This isn’t paranoia; it’s the current score. An audit published in The Lancet found fabricated references in roughly 1 in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in early 2026, and the NIH now refuses applications substantially developed by AI. The verification layer isn’t optional for anyone.

Where my data lives

In two places – and if, like me, you have to comply with GDPR, this part is really important.

On my computer: my notes, decisions, drafts, and projects are ordinary files I can open without any AI in the room. Different work lives in different folders, and a session sees only the folder I open for it.

On the AI companies’ servers: the tools I currently use are cloud services from Anthropic and OpenAI. My settings are set so that my work does not train their models. However, every conversation I have with them is transmitted to their servers and stored there under their policies. That fact shapes what I am allowed to put into them.

Client work adds hard obligations. I’m based in Germany, so GDPR applies to everything I do with clients – and I have non-disclosure agreements with most of them. I take this seriously: I don’t share client information publicly, and I don’t put client names, identifying details, or proprietary material into AI sessions. What client work does feed into this site, my newsletter, and my examples is generic – lessons I’ve learned using AI on the work, never the work itself.

My own proving grounds give me plenty of opportunities to test and play: this site, a hobby blog, a family member’s wiki. And when the system learns, it learns ways of working – figured out in one corner, carried to everything else I do.

What I disclose

The words: this site is heavily AI-drafted, and I disclose that once, for the whole site, instead of stamping every post. The method is vibe writing – I tell the story, the AI drafts it, and I fact-check, fix, and cut before anything ships. The ideas are mine and the editing is mine; the polish is the machine’s. I edit bad writing because it’s bad. I don’t reword clean writing to sneak it past an AI detector.

The images: if it’s on this site, it’s real – unless I say otherwise right where it appears. A photograph is a photograph; a screenshot is a screenshot. No AI people – no avatars that look real, no generated photos posing as the real thing. My professional photo was touched up by AI a while back. One of these days I’ll get a new one; until then, that’s the photo.

The tools: every paid tool named on this site, I pay full price for. No affiliate links, no sponsorships. Where I use a tool’s free tier, I say so where I name it. If any of that changes, it’ll say so right where it changes.