The interesting question about an AI assistant isn’t what it can do. It’s what you’ve actually handed over, and whether you’d hand over more.

I’ve been keeping track. Twenty-nine working sessions since June, and the pattern in them is not the one I would have predicted.

At first I used it the way most people do. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. Useful, forgettable, and roughly what a good search engine does if you’re patient with it.

The shift came when I stopped asking questions and started handing over work — with the files to do it in.

Then it got the keys to my notes

The first real handover was my knowledge vault: several hundred plain-text notes about faith, technical work, and whatever I’ve been building at the bench. Claude got full write access to reorganize, file, and connect them.

That’s a whole article on its own — How I Use Obsidian with Claude covers the structure, the guardrails, and what changed over six weeks. The short version is that it works, and it works because it asks before it destroys anything.

Now it runs on my computer

This is the part that would have made me nervous a year ago, and probably should still.

Claude doesn’t just write text for me to paste somewhere. It runs commands on my actual machine. In the last week alone it installed a runtime I didn’t have, set up a website project, wrote the scripts that publish it, uploaded the files to my web host over an encrypted connection, and committed every change to version control so I can undo any of it.

I didn’t type any of those commands. I approved them.

That distinction is the whole thing. I’m not delegating judgment — I’m delegating typing, and the tedium of getting details exactly right on the fortieth repetition. What I keep is the decision about whether it should happen at all.

Where I actually use it most

Here’s the part I got wrong about myself.

If you’d asked me what I use an AI assistant for, I’d have said work: documentation, procedures, technical writing. Thirty years in IT will do that to your self-image. But when I went back through the actual sessions, the largest single category wasn’t work at all.

It was the bench.

Sheet silver gauge conversions. Ring blank lengths. Bezel strip calculations for a stone I hadn’t cut yet. Whether to texture a base before setting a cabochon or after. Which weave to try next, and what it’ll cost me in wire. Design conversations about a pendant, where the useful contribution wasn’t the answer but the questions I hadn’t thought to ask.

That work is arithmetic-heavy and unforgiving. Get the blank length wrong and you’ve wasted silver and an evening. Having something that will do the geometry, show its working, and not get impatient when I ask the same question a fourth time turns out to matter more than any professional use I’d have named.

It spills into ordinary life too. One of the most-used things I’ve made in the last month is a barbecue timeline — work backwards from when people eat, print it, stick it on the fridge. Not sophisticated. Genuinely useful.

Writing, including this

The other steady use is writing. Not “generate me an article” — that produces something nobody wants to read. It’s closer to working with an editor who has read everything you’ve written and doesn’t get tired.

The most demanding piece I’ve done this way was an attempt to score a city government’s first months in office without cheering or sneering. That needed real research, a lot of “what would someone who disagrees say here,” and repeated passes to strip out the places I’d let a conclusion sneak in ahead of the evidence. I couldn’t have done it as well alone, and I couldn’t have done it at all if I’d just asked for an article.

This piece went through the same loop. I write, it drafts and pushes back, I cut what doesn’t sound like me. Then a script converts it from my note format to web format and publishes it.

Some of it runs without me

Every Friday afternoon a scheduled job wakes up, reads my notes, and writes me a review checklist: what’s sitting in my inbox, which notes look developed enough to promote, and a reminder to run the backup. I didn’t ask for it that week. It just appears.

That’s a small thing that changed the character of the whole system. The weekly review used to be something I intended to do. Now it’s something waiting for me.

Where it goes wrong

This is the part most accounts leave out, so here’s mine.

It has broken things. Early on it ran version control from inside a sandbox that couldn’t handle the lock files, and left my repository in a bad state. Recoverable, but it was my history it was mangling.

It has been too broad. Asked to commit one change, it swept up several unrelated edits I had in progress and committed those too. Nothing was lost, but the record was wrong until we untangled it.

It has shipped my mistakes faithfully. It published an article of mine that was truncated mid-sentence, because neither of us read to the end first. It did exactly what I asked.

Notice what those have in common. None of them are the failure everyone warns about — making things up. They’re all the same failure: confident action at slightly the wrong scope. It does what you said rather than what you meant, and fast enough that you find out afterwards.

The defense isn’t distrust, it’s scope. Ask for the narrow thing. Look at what changed. Keep everything in version control so being wrong is cheap.

Why it works for me

Two reasons, and neither is a feature.

The first is that it adapts to my systems instead of importing someone else’s. My vault is organized the way I think, not the way a productivity book says it should be, and the assistant follows my conventions because they’re written down where it can read them.

The second is that it’s genuinely good at the tedious middle layer — the stretch between having an idea and having a finished thing. That gap is where my projects used to die. It was never that the work was hard; it was that there was a lot of it, and it was dull, and dull work is what I quit.

What it isn’t: a colleague. It doesn’t remember Tuesday unless Tuesday got written down. It has no stake in whether the pendant comes out well. The judgment stays mine, and so does the checking — I’ve been burned enough to check.

But for turning a rough idea into a finished thing, it’s the most useful tool I’ve added to my working life in a long time. I keep handing it more. So far that’s gone well, and I’ve kept the receipts either way.

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