I was at my barber yesterday. John is a smart guy. We talk movies, investing, tech, and whatever else comes up. He tells me about his side hustles and I tell him about mine. Outside of the fact that he's a great barber, that's the reason I've been going to him for 7 years.
I told him about my latest coding project. It involves investing, and I'm not going to bore you with the details. When I told him AI was building it, he said the thing I've heard from a lot of non-tech-centric people:
"I don't know how I'm going to catch up."
Now, it's true that I spend a LOT of time working with AI. (I mean a LOT.) And yes, I've learned a lot. But I don't think I have a head start on anyone, because the biggest secret most people don't know is this.
"Use the tool...to use the tool."
I've got 20 agents in my stable, and I didn't write a single one of them. AI wrote them all. I've stopped telling AI HOW to do things. I've even stopped specifying what the tech stack should look like, because I don't care anymore. I want outcomes. I don't even start a project with a brain dump in an "ideas.md" file anymore, and that was my go-to technique for almost a year.
When I have an idea, I fire up my current AI tool and start a conversation. I USUALLY start in the desktop app. We talk. I describe the idea, and it iterates on it and fleshes out the details. If I like what I see, I tell it we're going to build. From that point on, the agents take over and I'm the meat proxy clicking the "Allow" button over and over again.
About half of my agents deal with programming or building software. They start building, and I've had them run for up to 8 hours at a time with only a couple of prompts from me. OK, it's a LITTLE more complicated than that. I've got a couple of loops in my process and a couple of built-in gates where I can kill a project if I decide I don't like it. But you get the gist.
The point is, none of that requires much in the way of technical knowledge. I start a conversation about WHAT I want built, not HOW I want it built, and the agents do the rest.
So John doesn't need to catch up. He needs to understand that the tool will help him use the tool. AI will help him flesh out the idea and help him structure it. Heck, if you've got things configured properly, it'll create the repo for you and push to it regularly.
Learn to use the tool to use the tool. Then unleash your inner idea hamster and see what y'all build together.
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "Use the tool...to use the tool"