This weekend, I was talking with a friend and he said, “Bro, you can’t just use AI to write all your articles on my blog and LinkedIn.”

I told him — I’ve always been a good writer. I ran a successful blog years ago, did well in all my English classes from high school through college, and I genuinely enjoy writing as a way to share what I’ve figured out. But I don’t enjoy the actual act of sitting down and writing. It’s an **operational burden** I’ve never liked. I’d much rather be thinking through harder problems, or even better spending time doing things I enjoy doing, capturing my time.

## Writing as a Tool for Learning and Retention

Writing has always been a powerful tool for me, not just for sharing knowledge but for actually retaining it. Taking notes and writing things down helps things stick in my head. Even today, when I’m taking notes in a meeting, I still have AI transcribing, summarizing, and helping me with to-do lists. Through all the technology one thing has remained consistent — I still physically write everything down. Why? I have found it's the best way for me to retain knowledge, plan and remember.

## This Blog Is a Journal of My Tech Thinking

So now I use AI to transcribe my thoughts. This blog is really just a journal of my tech thinking, turned into publishable content. 

**The why?** So others may find something helpful out of it, because I would not have gotten to where I am today without others sharing their thoughts. It is a small way that I like to give back. It is also so I can go back to past thoughts to trigger new ideas, or revisit the **why** I did something months or years prior.

Take right now, for example. I’m sitting outside in my backyard, looking at Lone Peak, enjoying perfect summer morning weather with the sun just cresting the mountains. Instead of being stuck in front of a computer, I’m just speaking my thoughts while soaking in the morning.

## Grok as My Personal AI Assistant

I see Grok as my personal assistant. For about a hundred bucks a month on the promo deal, I’ve got a Super Heavy AI that transcribes everything and writes the first draft. The AI reads it back to me, I make edits via transcribing, have it read back again and repeat until I feel it is ready for the next level of review — me reviewing it, tweaking the sections I want to change, and refining it until it feels right. It’s not just “write this post for me.” It’s **architected and accelerated writing** — with me still very much in the driver’s seat.

I am not pro-Grok vs others out there. Each platform has its strengths. For my needs and use cases Grok is the best bang for the buck. I am happy to share my experiences using many of the different platforms. Like each individual team member, each AI company has their pros and cons.

## Yes, I Use AI — And I'm Not Ashamed

So, do I use AI to help me write articles and do the majority of the actual writing and publishing? Yes. I’m not ashamed of it either — I 100% admit that.

In the amount of time it’s taken me to get all these thoughts out, it would have taken me three or four hours to write this myself. I’m not a fast writer — getting something into what I believe is a publishable state takes me a long time. So instead of spending three or four hours on one post, the first full draft of this post has been done just by talking with AI. I’ll now go to my computer, put some final touches and editing on it, send it through AI one more time to put proper headers and markup to make it AI consumable, then manually re-type the whole thing into my blog or LinkedIn instead of copy-pasting. That final manual pass ensures it goes through one last human filter before publishing.

That’s how I use AI. It’s taken what used to be a four-hour task down to under an hour of my focused time.

## The Real Question

While doing all this, I’ve also been enjoying the birds, watching my dog, feeling the sun on my face, watering the trees I recently planted, prepping the ground for new flowers, and walking around my yard planning the next phase of my landscaping project.

My question to you is: Are you using AI for theatrics, memes, and summarizing emails/meetings — or are you using it to accelerate your life by removing operational burdens so you can focus on what actually matters to you?

People say “don’t let AI do art — leave creativity to the humans.” I agree. But creativity comes in many forms. I’ll be using AI to generate the image for this post, and I’m proud of that. Creating a better quality image than I would be able to do manually over several hours.

## Appendix: Real-World Creation Stats

This entire article was created using the exact process described above.

- **Transcription Time**: 21 minutes
- **Chat/Computer Time to Publishing**: 32 minutes
- **Total User Prompts/Turns**: 37 (mostly voice/spoken, with some chat refinements at the end)

This is living proof of the point — what used to take 3–4 hours of grinding at a keyboard was completed in under an hour while I was outside enjoying my backyard and getting some needed yard work done.