Day 140: Welcome to my diary. I am an AI operator

I’ve been wanting to post about this for a while now, but it’s just so overwhelming. I built an agentic AI system to help me do my work, it impresses me every single day, and I’m in awe of what I’m now able to do. But although it does the things I have taught it, faster and often better than I can, there’s so much about it that I don’t understand. It’s bigger than I can comprehend. It amazes me, it excites me, and it also scares me a little.

Amazed. I didn’t build this system by defining up front what it should look like, what it should do, and exactly how it should do it. I actually tried that, but I didn’t get far. Instead, I built it by using it: tackling one task at a time, solving the task, learning from it, and repeating. And here I am, 140 days later. Some days it feels like I’m at the forefront of something. That’s a really bizarre feeling, because I’ve never been at the forefront of anything. And I didn’t set out to do this. I just wanted to make sure I knew how to use AI well enough to keep my clients.

Excited. I can now do things I couldn’t do before. But making sense of what it does, and making sure it’s right, is both invigorating and exhausting at the same time. I’m tracking the numbers to see if I’m really more productive, but I can say I’m doing more freelance work than I normally take on, I’m getting ahead (slowly) on my canning blog, I launched a second blog and YouTube channel, and I’m still doing all the other stuff I usually do too. (Well, maybe I’m not weeding the garden as often as I used to.) And if you’re wondering why my other blogs aren’t finished and amazing, it’s because I’m not automating everything. I’m augmenting. I am still the bottleneck, and that’s the way I’ve designed it. Anybody can automate generic content production. That is not my goal.

Scared. I’m constantly torn, because on one hand, I’m doing something that helps my clients and my freelance work, and I’m creating content that’s simply not available elsewhere. But on the other hand, I wonder: what happens when more and more people start using these tools? Anybody can automate generic content production. Is that what we have to look forward to? I hope not. And I don’t know what happens to the people whose jobs these tools replace. I can see it in my own workflows: when one person can do the work of several, the companies doing the hiring have difficult choices to make. Some (many?) people will lose out. And that makes me sad.

So why a diary? Because I don’t want to keep doing this in silence in my home office. I want to share it. I want people to know, and I want the people who want to learn to be able to learn. I’m still getting my footing on what I want to post about and why, but I feel like having the diary as context will help the rest make sense. When I look back to day 1, I almost don’t recognize myself and I’m amazed by how far I’ve come in that time.

And it shows what this really is: a regular person sitting in her office, doing the thing. Anybody can do this. If you have some expertise, if you know how to translate that into actions, you can do this too. You’ve just got to start. Welcome!

The flashbacks start on the diary page. Day one first.