🧭 THIS WEEK AT AI SECOND ACT
Howdy, It’s a 2 in one!
Fighting chaos at work
Quick start - building stuff with AI - aka vibe coding, aka magic
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My goal is to make this as valuable and practical as possible as we navigate the new AI era. 🚀
🧰 AI NEWS + LEARNING
Here are a few things I found recently:
Anthropic AI & Economics report - ridiculously long - skill test - can you summarise it!
AI acceleration at work - how to adopt AI
🗺️ FEATURED INSIGHT
Part I: How to Use AI to Restructure Your Work
If you’re Gen X, chances are you’ve been working for a while. Funny thing is, companies are generally chaos held together by a few high performers keeping the rest afloat. There always is a bunch of very poor tools and even poorer processes.
After a while, your work cadence/style can get messed up, can get unstructured & reactionary. AI can help with that!
Restructuring Your Work Around AI
The Problem With AI-Assisted Work
Most people's AI workflow looks like this:
Think about what you need to do
Start doing it yourself
Get stuck
Ask AI for help
Go back to doing it yourself
That's not AI-assisted work. That's work with occasional AI interruptions.
The mental model is backwards. You're still doing the heavy lifting. AI is just a fancy search engine that sometimes writes code that almost works.
The Restructured Approach
Here's what actually works:
Step 1: Describe the outcome, not the task
Instead of "write a function that validates email addresses," try "I need to validate user input before it hits the database—email, phone, and address fields. The validation needs to be consistent across our React frontend and Node backend."
See the difference? You're describing what you're trying to achieve, not the mechanical steps. AI can figure out the steps. That's literally what it's good at.
Step 2: Let AI do the first draft of everything
Everything. The code. The documentation. The test cases. The project structure.
Your job isn't to write code anymore. Your job is to evaluate code, improve code, and make decisions about code.
Step 3: Work in tight feedback loops
The old workflow: plan for three days, build for two weeks, discover it's wrong.
The AI workflow: describe → generate → test → adjust. Takes about 20 minutes. If it's wrong, you've lost 20 minutes, not two weeks.
Step 4: Batch the human-judgment stuff
AI can generate a hundred variations. You need to pick the right one. That's where your experience matters.
I batch my decision-making. I'll have AI generate five approaches to a problem, then spend 15 minutes evaluating all of them.
The Mindset Shift
Stop thinking: "What tasks can AI help me with?"
Start thinking: "What decisions require my judgment, and what can AI handle?"
For most knowledge work, AI can handle about 80% of the generation. Your job is the 20% that requires taste, experience, and domain knowledge.
My main job tasks and responsibilities are <xyz>. I've found my days/weeks/months and working style becoming too chaotic and reactionary. Research the best and most efficient approach to work for my role and provide an orderly work cadence, that increases efficiency, reduces reactionary work, reduces wasteful meetings and improves value.Part II: Try Vibe Coding in 15 Minutes
"Vibe coding" means you describe what you want in natural language, and AI writes the code. You guide the vibe. The AI does the typing. Just search on YouTube for how may amazing things people are building. See here for what I’ve been building as a relative newbie.
I’ll be writing some more in depth articles on this in future, but here’s the starting point.
Go to replit.com, sign up (free), and click "Create Repl." Pick any template—Python, JavaScript, whatever. Now click the AI button and type: "Build me a simple todo list app with add, delete, and mark complete."
Watch it build the whole thing. In your browser. No installs. No terminal. No config files.
That's vibe coding. You described what you wanted, AI wrote the code, and you've got a working app in about three minutes.
Want to change something? Just tell it: "Add a dark mode toggle" or "Make it save to local storage." The AI reads your existing code and updates it.
Replit's free tier is plenty to mess around with. Once you're hooked, you can explore other tools.
Weekly AI strategies for operating executives
— Brett
👉 Hit “Reply” and share your experience — I read every one!
