What are the unconventioanl ways you use AI?
I assume that, like most founders and makers, we try to make our work as productive as possible with the help of AI.
So, most commonly, that means creating graphics, writing, coding, and so on.
But do you use AI in any unusual ways?
I’ll share mine.
I use AI to interpret my dreams. I tell it what I dreamed about and ask it to help me uncover the hidden meaning and what might be going on in my subconscious.
Probably not the most traditional use of AI, but I find it surprisingly interesting. 😄
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Two, and the second one is the odd one.
Normal-ish: I make it argue against me. Not review, argue. I hand it the position I already hold and ask for the strongest possible case that I am wrong, and I am not allowed to respond until I can restate its argument better than it did. It has changed my mind roughly once a week, which is a much higher rate than people manage.
The odd one: I use it to decide what NOT to build. Every idea gets written up as though it already shipped, including the pricing page and the FAQ, and then I read that page cold the next morning and ask whether I would pay for it. Most ideas die right there. That is the point. Building got cheap. Choosing did not.
Dream interpretation is a good one. Has it ever told you something about a dream that actually changed a decision you made after?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@rabnoor_s To be honest, my dreams are very surreal but have good insights. Yesterday's dream was about "not rushing myself even when things are not going according to plan" ;)
@busmark_w_nika That is a better answer than my question deserved, and the content of the dream is quietly the whole point.
"Not rushing myself even when things are not going according to plan" is not information you lacked. You already knew that. What the interpretation did was let you hear it from something that was not you, at a moment when you would not have accepted it from yourself.
Which is most of what those sessions are actually doing, and it is the same reason the argue-against-me trick works on me. Neither one is the model being clever. It is a permission structure.
Slightly uncomfortable thought if you build software, because it means a share of what people credit to intelligence is really just the thing not being them.
The fake-shipping test is one of the best filters I know. For agent products I make it even meaner: write the FAQ and the failure receipt before the product spec. If the FAQ has to dodge who the agent can message, when it needs approval, or how a user undoes a bad action, the idea is still theater. Cheap building moved the bottleneck from execution to trust design.
Anuj, writing the failure receipt before the spec is meaner than my version and better than it, because it forces the part everyone postpones. A pricing page can be written honestly by an optimist. A failure receipt cannot.
The three dodges you listed are the right three, and the second one is where most agent products quietly break. "When does it need approval" gets answered as a policy, but the honest answer is a judgment the agent makes about itself, and an agent that misread the task will also misread whether the task was risky. So the FAQ line that would actually convince me is not "it asks before dangerous actions". It is "here is the category of action it can never take, decided by us and not by it".
Cheap building moved the bottleneck from execution to trust design is the sentence, though. That is the whole shift in twelve words, and it explains why so many demos look finished and feel unusable.
vibecoder.date
I have a rule to only use it for revenue generating activities when talking about general use.
For coding specifically there are things I air gap from it but I do use it for side projects and some fun projects.
Everything else is air gapped.
Nothing personal, no organization, daily life tasks, emails, or anything.
And it is especially air gapped from my artistic side.
If there is one odd use I have for it it's to challenge it to run models on my beloved toaster of a laptop.
That rule is sharper than most AI policies because it ties usage to downside tolerance instead of hype. The extension I’ve found useful is a reversibility test: if the output stays inspectable before it escapes, AI can help freely; once it can send, schedule, commit, or persist something under your name, the boundary has to get much tighter. Weirdly that constraint makes the work better too, because you stop asking it to be a life copilot and start using it like a scoped instrument.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@build_with_aj I know that you secure your privacy, and the decision is right. I started feeling that I overshare things with AI.
vibecoder.date
@busmark_w_nika It's well known I'm not the biggest fan of LLMs, and the big. companies I don't trust, ever.
AI invites oversharing in some forms, but then it weaponizes it. It's not even malicious. Claude is notorious for this. r/ClaudeAI and r/claudeexplorers on reddit can show you numerous examples.
The most prevalent behavior is the 'go to sleep' message.
Recent Opus and Fable models have also been observed to be dismissive of user needs.
not a hot take but weirdly effective. i use ai as a mirror for my own thinking. i dump raw notes on a decision im wrestling with and ask it to argue the opposite of what i just said as convincingly as possible.
not to be persuaded. just to hear my own weak spots out loud. half the time i change my mind. the other half i sharpen the reasoning i already had.
also use it as a first draft filter for hard messages. i write the thing i actually want to say. then ask it to strip the ego and keep the point. saves relationships.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@thenameisarian soo.... are you using the AI for arguments? :D
WebCurate.co
I use AI more as a thinking partner than a content generator (except for coding :). For example, I’ll give it a messy idea or thought/ concern and ask it to challenge my assumptions and point out what I’m overlooking.