I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what AI is actually good for. Not the stuff that gets the headlines. Not the picture-to-cartoon filters or the “write me a sonnet about my dog” party tricks. I think those are maladaptive uses. They’re novelty, not utility. Or worse, they’re clickbait for people to monetize their social media.
The question I keep coming back to is this: what do I need an intelligence to do where I don’t have to spend my own? Where are the gaps in my ability to think, and can something else assist me with those?
I have ADHD. My brain doesn’t do focus the way other brains do. I get distracted quickly. I forget things. Important things. I also hyperfocus and ignore most everything else, including my own thirst and hunger. And for most of my life, the implicit message has been that I just need to try harder. Power through. Be tough. Get organized. Use a planner. Set reminders. Just discipline myself into working like everyone else.
That’s insulting. That’s not how my brain works. In fact, it can’t work that way. And I shouldn’t be trying to force it to work in a way it doesn’t.
Here’s what I think the real promise of AI is. Not replacing human intelligence but complementing it. Being a second brain that fills in the gaps where yours doesn’t quite do what you want. Everyone has different gaps. Mine are focus, memory, and follow-through. AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t get distracted. It doesn’t get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. It can hold attention on something for as long as it needs to. That’s not me. But it can be my tool.
So I use an AI assistant for a handful of things, and none of them are about generating clever content. I use it as an accountability partner. Something that checks in, asks what I’m working on, and holds me to what I said I’d do. I use it as a researcher, both for things I need looked up often and for one-off questions that would take me an hour to track down. I use it as a programming assistant and a writing assistant. Not to do the thinking for me but to handle the parts of the work that don’t require my intelligence at all. Formatting a document. Structuring the thing I already figured out. Helping me see the connections in the mass of notes that I’ve created over the years.
And here’s the one that matters most to me at the moment. I use it to remember what I’ve done.
I have a hard time knowing what I’ve accomplished. Not in a modest way. In a real, “what did I even do this week?” way. I’ll finish a day feeling like I got nothing done, and then my AI assistant can pull up a list of six things I completed, decisions I made, problems I solved. Things I already forgot about because my brain moved on to the next thing. That feeling of emptiness about my own productivity is something I’ve carried for years. Having a tool that reflects my own work back to me changes that. Not because it’s inflating my ego. Because it’s showing me who I really am by what I’ve really done.
This is what I want to help other people with. Not everyone has ADHD, but everyone has gaps. Places where their brain doesn’t hold up its end of the deal. And the answer isn’t to muscle through with willpower you don’t have. The answer is to build a system that covers for you.
The thing is, this doesn’t work out of the box. You can’t just download an AI and expect it to know what you need. It has to be shaped. You have to tell it how you work, what you forget, what you struggle with, what matters to you. I built a custom assistant that’s tuned to my brain and my life. Not everyone has the ability to build one from scratch. But I think with the AI’s own help, anyone can shape whatever they start with into something that works for them. You describe the gap, and the AI helps you build the bridge.
That’s the version of AI I’m interested in. Not the one that makes AI videos of things that never happened for more views. The one that can look at your calendar and prevent you from being surprised by a party you said you’d go to a month ago. The one that holds the thread when your brain drops it. The one that shows you what you actually did when you feel like you did nothing.
I think a lot of people are struggling with the same things I struggle with, and they don’t have a name for it or a tool for it yet. They just know they’re not operating at full capacity and they can’t figure out why. The answer might be that they’re trying to do everything with one brain when they could have two.