Greetings all! I'm new to this community but have developed an early impression that many of you, like me, found your way to here specifically (and to AI in general) because you are possessed of a tinkerer's mindset. We see so much of the world as being Systems containing levers, switches, and dials that we love to get our hands on and experiment with. If that's you, I could use your help. I've been excited by Generative AI and its applications since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022; however, a lot of my early experimentation on building things with AI fizzled out because the promises there didn't land. I was tempted by an oft-referenced idea of a 'Daily Brief' that ingested my emails and calendar to spit out a 5–10-minute summary to free up some time at the start of each day. I spent a week refining the project only to realize that I'd already so fine-tuned my email and calendar with deterministic tools (filters, rules, lists and the like) that the inclusion of AI wasn't offering any meaningful time savings. I went after a few other suggested "quick wins" or "first projects" to chase an easy example of capturing value with AI but kept running into the same assumption: The learner wasn't optimizing their day-to-day life before AI. For those of us who have been, and indeed who had made something of a habit of it, a lot of these early projects follow a predictable pattern: We dismantle a system we'd previously built and iterated upon to solve a problem, then detail the problem that returns in the absence of that system. We then apply AI tools and processes to address the resuscitated problem and are told to celebrate the result and declare victory while marveling at what AI has done for us. I didn't see the real value with AI until I sat down and built something with AI to address a struggle I actually had and came up with a practice that kept new projects on task while avoiding the frequent 'yak-shaving'* urges that derailed such projects in the past. Once that was in place and I saw how useful it was (and how easy it was to refine and improve it,) I was sold on potential utility this technology could have for people willing to work with it.