A year of wiring AI into my workflow

In the summer of 2025, I decided to seriously test whether AI could actually help me — not as a chatbot I'd occasionally poke at, but wired deep into my daily workflow. A year later, it has become one of the best investments I've ever made.

My workflow B.I. (Before Intelligence)

Before that, my workflow looked like this:

• Brand copy → think it up myself, revise endlessly, show it around, revise again
• Code → read the docs, search Stack Overflow, trial and error, try again
• Translation → back and forth between Japanese and Chinese, stalling on every rare word
• Research → read piles of articles, take notes by hand

None of these steps was "wrong." But they all shared one problem: the upfront cost was enormous, while the payoff concentrated in the final 20%. 80% of my time went into starting from scratch, and only 20% went into actual refinement and polish.

What AI actually changed

AI didn't replace my work. It replaced the first draft of my work.

When I write brand copy, I no longer stare at a blank page. I hand the core idea and keywords to AI first, and let it produce 3–5 drafts heading in different directions. Those drafts are usually mediocre — too formal, lacking personality, with a distinct "AI flavor." But a mediocre first draft is ten thousand times better than no first draft. My job shifted from "starting from zero" to "starting from 70%," and then I polish the remaining 30% up to 100.

When I write code, AI is my translator. I have an idea — "I want a function that reads every Markdown file in this directory, pulls the date and title from the frontmatter, sorts by date, and generates an HTML list." I describe that idea in plain language, and AI translates it into code. I don't need to memorize the exact syntax of every API. I only need to know what is possible, then let AI make it happen.

When I translate Japanese, AI is my first reader. I write a passage in Japanese and have AI check the grammar and tone. It doesn't replace my own understanding of Japanese, but it catches the details I miss.

What AI can't do

After this year, my picture of AI's limits is much sharper:

• AI has no taste. It can generate copy that meets the spec, but it doesn't know what "good" means, or what moves people. Taste still requires a human to judge.
• AI has no memory. Every conversation starts from zero. It doesn't know what you wrote three months ago, or how your style has evolved. You have to manage the context yourself.
• AI won't say "I don't know." When it isn't sure about something, it produces an answer that sounds plausible instead of admitting uncertainty. That's dangerous.
• AI takes no responsibility for outcomes. If AI-generated copy goes wrong, the responsibility lies with the person who used it, not the machine. AI is always a tool, never a scapegoat.

My AI stack

After a year of trial and error, my daily AI stack has settled on the following:

• Claude — my mainstay for long-form writing and deep analysis. It understands Chinese better than GPT does.
• DeepSeek — my first choice for code generation. Fast, accurate, cheap.
• Local models — for sensitive content or offline scenarios. Slower, but the data never leaves the machine.
• API aggregation — multiple models behind a single interface, routed automatically by task type.

One year later

AI didn't make me faster. It made me less tired. The steps that demand heavy upfront investment for limited returns — first drafts, translation, formatting, doc lookup — are handled by AI now. What I keep is the final judgment, the polish of style, the creative direction. That is the core of the work.

If you're thinking about wiring AI into your own workflow, my advice is this: start with the step you hate most. Find the most draining step in your work and see whether AI can take the first draft off your hands. You don't need to get everything right at once, and you don't need to chase perfection. Let it turn "blank" into "something," and then you take over.

---

What does your AI workflow look like? Write and tell me: ryu@scolv.com.