There are three choices when you need to automate something:

1. Look for an existing solution.

2. Build your own.

3. Hijack an existing platform.

When trying to solve a modern problem, first start by trying to find a solution that’s already out there. Because it’s almost certainly cheaper to pay someone $20 a month if they truly have solved your problem.

But if you’re like me, and you’re constantly amazed how terrible commercial software products can be with billions of dollars behind them and fleets of world-class engineers (anything Microsoft has ever made, for example), you’ll find that off-the-shelf solutions may not cut it for you.

In that case, now you can build your own version of many tools, exactly the way you want, with AI coding.

But a third use case is particularly interesting, as well. You can also hijack an existing platform to get it to do things it wasn’t necessarily intended for. For example, I love Slack, and I quickly realized that replacing it wouldn’t be worth the effort. So I happily pay them their fee.

BUT, I’ve got an army of bots hooked into my Slack letting it be my central hub for managing a team of remote coding agents, for handling all my calendar bookings, for keeping my CRM up to date, for instantaneous universal translation for remote workers, for logging time-tracking in my custom agency platform, and so much more.

So when you come to a piece of software that really is good, don’t replace that one. I love Slack, so it stays. Just buy it. But consider which apps you use can become even more useful to you by extending their functionality in surprising ways.

In the future, only the apps that truly earn their keep will stay, and we’ll appreciate them all the more.

21 years later, it's Automator's time to finally shine.

I remember Steve Jobs introducing “Automator” as part of Mac OS X Tiger in 2005. At the end of his keynote, he demoed the app that would let you automate any mundane task on your Mac.

The trouble is, most people, myself included, found limited use for it. And it sat unnoticed on the vast majority of machines it came installed on for two decades.

Case in point: How long have you had a Mac? Have you ever used the Automator App? Did you even know you had it?

But today?

Automator apps are incredible for an entirely new category of AI-generated personal apps. I’ll work you through several that I’ve made over the next weeks, but here’s one that appeals to the audio nerd in me.

If you’re not an audio person, you probably don’t know that there are loudness standards: How loud should dialog be for a Netflix show so all shows sound the same? What’s the target average loudness for a YouTube video? For a social media video, for a podcast?

Audio people have these standards memorized. I know that podcasts are -16 on the loudness scale, YouTube is -14, Apple’s web content is -18, and TV/broadcast is -23 LUFS. That’s a lot to keep track of! And non-audio people have no idea what any of this means. Popular apps like Final Cut Pro don’t help you achieve this at ALL. So most people are just guessing with their audio most of the time, which is another word for failing at it.

DaVinci Resolve can automatically optimize exports for common loudness standards, but even that isn’t as useful or as powerful as what I’ve built. In the past, if audio people wanted to optimize files themselves, they’d use something like iZotope RX, load a file in, apply the loudness control plugin, and export the audio. Easy enough, but time consuming at scale, and RX isn’t cheap.

So I built an automator app that uses FFMPEG to scan my video files and automatically adjust the loudness to whatever I want, and it works in bulk easily. I just drag the video I want processed onto my automator app, or an entire folder, and it goes through like magic.

As a bonus: My custom content creation and publishing platform is where I make and stage all my content. And the LinkedIn API has a limit for some accounts of 200 MB. So I made my automator app also compress my video to under 200 MB while it’s optimizing the loudness. So I can simply run every video I ever produce through this app, knowing that it will all be up to spec, optimize my database storage, and play nice with every API.

If you haven’t given Automator a look, you might find some incredible new uses for it with AI.

Remember: Just because everyone around you is using AI in the same way, that doesn’t mean there aren’t entire categories of uses of AI that very few people are talking about. Go forth and discover!

If there’s enough interest, I might make a community around some of these ideas and give away some of my software tools, but that part’s on you!

There’s a reason showers have two knobs.

Cold=No one should ever use AI for anything ever, PERIOD!

Hot=I’m going to use AI to do all my writing, my website, be my girlfriend, and also imagine me as Wonder Woman!

Now look, Wim Hof aficionados swear by all-cold showers. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you can stomach it. Heck, they might even be really healthy!

And maybe there are some maniacs out there who enjoy the sensation of burning alive each morning.

But for the vast majority of brands and people? AI is not a hot or cold thing. It’s dialing in the right temperature for optimum—say, pleasing results.

Too little AI? You’re probably inefficient and will lag behind competitors.

Too much? You probably come across as inauthentic/fake/scammy.

But take heart: This is a learning process we are all going through right now. And we will all get it wrong from time to time as we argue over what temperature the perfect shower should be.

There’s one thing I think we can all agree on: No one should have to imagine me as Wonder Woman, ever again.

I love thinking about the future. I love thinking about what’s beyond Earth.

As I took this photo of last night’s near-lunar eclipse, I was filled with awe.

We believe the universe is knowable. That with enough rockets and enough time, we can colonize our galaxy.

Me? I’m not convinced.

Why?

On the cosmic scale, traveling at the speed of light (which, by the way, is physically impossible so far as we know) is a STANDSTILL.

We believe that traveling at the speed of light means stars will fly past us like ludicrous speed from Spaceballs.

In reality? Traveling at the speed of light out in space would be indistinguishable from not traveling at all. No stars move. No galaxies get closer. Completely parked.

To achieve the effect of Star Trek–style visuals, we would actually need to move more like 1,000,000,000,000,000 times the speed of light.

One quadrillion times the speed of light.

The fact that it would take us 40 minutes to get to Jupiter in our current solar system at the speed of light (again, so far impossible) tells us everything we need to know about how incomprehensibly large space is.

Earth is a spaceship.

It’s our spaceship.

Our dreams are on this planet, not in colonizing what might be out there.

Now look: I could mention Blade Runner, or The Matrix… or any of a number of my favorite movies about the future.

But one movie got the emotional reality of our AI future more correct than any other, and it’s not what you think.

Yes, of course I’m talking about the 1992 Disney Animated classic, Aladdin.

One of the all-time greats.

Why is this such a good mental model?

In AI, we all found a magic lamp. We all have own own personal genie. And each of us is being granted more than three wishes on a daily basis, or at least as many as our subscription quotas will allow.

In the hands of the benevolent among us, we’re using those wishes for things like: “Let’s provide clean drinking water for all the citizens of the globe!” You get the idea.

Some of us are Aladdins, using the genie for good.

But whoever owns the lamp can control the genie.

The genie in Aladdin’s hands? Hilarious.

The genie in Jafar’s hands? Terrifying.

Because the genie has to do whatever the operator tells it to, it can either be incredible or horrific.

…or, like the movie, we can set the genie free.

And just hope that all it wants is a trip to Disneyland.