Originally, I was making a self-conscious introduction to a few Claude Skills I had come up with to help me find unique interpretations of Human Design data. However, the opening is already way too large, and as a non-editor of my own writing, I've just turned this into its own essay.

Here I am, presenting a couple potentially useful tools for anyone who cares in an age that if someone did care enough, they could make it themselves. Perhaps AI stands for the Age of Irony.

I only say this because I'm naturally conditioned to feel guilty for using AI. For those living online a little too much, this technology has become the primary target for almost every problem, from jobs to climate change. For some cases, like energy use, there is nothing to argue: Until there are groundbreaking innovations in parallel processing and data bandwidth (both of which are currently supplied by GPUs and RAM), the ever-growing server farms crunching AI data will be a drain on resources throughout the world.

Yes, I feel guilty, because I always felt like my values were positioned toward a Luddite-lite wisdom of minimalism. Yet that has always been an aspiration: No matter how many countries I travel, forests and deserts I trek through, and wildfires I've helped suppress, I've always had an eye for technology and what works. I've always come back from the mountains and the rivers and thought, Okay laptop, what can you do for me now?

The past 30 years of technology, besides the laptop, the smartphone, and the server, have been a bust. Yes, billions are made on video games and virtual reality accessories and smart watches, but the real money and real change in society has always come from the Terminal: One's primary entry into the internet. Every other digital and electrical product has been secondary, supporting the Terminal in its many expressions.

Adobe makes artistic tools for Terminals. Apple Watch gives health data to the Terminals. Instagram connects Terminals together with ads and imagery.

The laptop and smartphone have had decades now to express itself through digital art and writings and music. The server is now speaking through what is known as "AI", but is better described as a Large Language Model, a software that uses statistics to figure out what to say, letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, until someone's made their own vibe-coded app or a Harry Potter fan fic story.

I just saw someone claiming they made a health-tracking app on their fancy smart sunglasses while walking around New York City. Yes, the sunglasses were a display for the real Terminal: The server. The server is soon becoming the sought-after consumer Terminal, and there will be a couple more decades' of value to be gotten from this paradigm shift.

While Apple's attempting to implement AI locally on iPhones, Android has nearly given up that fight and delegated all of its advanced generative technologies to servers. Whisper Flow, Gemini, Notion, Canva... All 90% server-based, so these services don't have to worry about how much of a potato your phone is.

My primary fascination with consumer technology is how far it will go to make a life easier. I can't say it can make my life, or your life easier, because it requires a very specific type of person to make life easier. I am very much grounded to my house, which requires plants to be watered, a front and back yard to be cleaned up, and food to be cooked. You might notice that AI can't do any of that for me, so I know that I can only look as a fascinated outside observer of this digital phenomenon.

Here's the lifestyle of those who AI will both empower—and possibly destroy, if used improperly: The digital native, living in a minimalist apartment, maybe they're even in one of those Japanese hostel pods and just have a table after they climb down from their bed. Food is DoorDashed to them. That succulent is not from a nursery but Ikea. Physically, they have so little to manage but their own body. Almost all aspects of their life can be successfully managed by a Large Language Model, because almost all aspects their life is based in knowledge.

Knowledge of their health stats, their clothes, the specs of their Terminals, the macronutrients of their food; "If it can be measured, it can be controlled," as someone didn't really say, and I'm even paraphrasing it now. Large Language Models are constrained to the knowledge environment, and most people unfortunately have to deal with a lot more than knowledge in their physical environment.

But this is what I'm fascinated with, even if I cannot live the lifestyle that AI is so geared toward. So I come back to my very humble use of AI models like Anthropic's Claude to clean up digital files I'm too lazy to organize myself, and to ask questions about Human Design that I can't find online. The best I've found for the use of AI is to have a third-party give suggestions that I hadn't thought of before, and those suggestions, with enough mulling over, may become insights that helps me interact with my physical environment better.

The messiness of relationships and people and groups and environments that are being set aflame by lightning and chains dragging on pavement in the most arid environments. I can still ask AI questions about new perspectives on the knowledge I've built on all of these very physical circumstances, and sometimes it provides something useful, or at least a formatted structure that I can find useful for myself.

I realize that the guilt I built for myself with regard to AI is conditioned by people who don't want a new perspective on the information that they've been given in life. They'd rather wrestle with the same problem over and over and over again and feel like the struggle itself is the means of transcendence. And maybe it is, but I've never been one to leave money on the table when it looks like there's so much opportunity in something so accessible. So I will learn to use AI models with care and precision that helps me accomplish tasks I couldn't do before.

Even more importantly, these tasks I can now accomplish actually have to do with self-education; that the newly developed Skill I created for Claude will actually allow me to stop using Claude after a few uses, because the Skill provides me the education to do it myself from now on.

In other words, I use AI to work it out of a job. And when the companies crash or become domain to only the richest people, and I am locked out from access to this technology, I'll only have gained a few more life skills for the rest of my life. Then, as it has been, I can walk away from the Terminal and enjoy a few more weeks of grass and people again.