Chat G-3PO

Since I worked most of the weekend I took today off, and so far I’ve spent my day getting absolutely blasted on Chat-GPT Plug-In non-alcoholic seltzers and allowing myself to step into a world in which all of the energy that AI automation can save me begins to swirl around me like I’m Goku and have finally channeled my way into my Super Saiyan form.

The plug-ins dropped a couple weeks ago I think, but I only really had time to look into them this morning and WHAT A SIGHT IT WAS. Just like everyone else, my first order of business was to install the Figlet app and have it write “Tipper Gore Was A Narc” in ASCII font, which is a task I would say it performed quite quite well:

After that I swan-dived into the rest of the plug-in store stew replete with chunks of unskinned carrots and bouillon cubes to help you find the tastiest parts for your bowls. Part of my excitement about AI stuff in general right now (an excitement which plays companion to a rational amount of fear and skepticism as well) is that in its current state, it already can help a lot of people with a lot of things that eat up large chunks of their days. Since getting started is not necessarily obvious, I thought I’d give anyone interested a quick and dirty intro to the great beyond that has started to swirl above us like a furry, lavender vortex. Let’s do this.

Step 1 - Why Do I Need To Do This

You might not, or you might not want it! And both of those are OK obviously. If you think you might though, here’s how I’ve started to map things out (and I still have a ways to go):

What are the things in my life that I least like doing, and then of those things how often do I need to do them? That produces something of a Maslow’s hierarchy of stuff you don’t want to do the most, either because of the task itself or how often you have to do it or a factor of both, and then you can start working through each item on there as you see fit using external tools.

For me, my list has started to fill up with things related to planning trips (I like traveling but hate doing anything related to making trips happen), sorting and transferring information between systems at work (all subscription ecosystems basically require a bunch of different systems to talk to each other that don’t necessarily love talking to each other on their own), and budgeting/monitoring home bills and adjusting accordingly/etc. And one of the traditionally hard things about automating a system is figuring out what each step of the system’s process should do along the way. For instance, I’ve very often thought I knew what should happen at a certain step but was wrong, which is a great way to learn honestly and is fine. But having some wild-capable input along the way is really nice.

Which is why I’m stoked about looking into AI automation. You can let it do the thinking along the way for you, or at least some of it, so that you have to write fewer steps and worry less about things falling apart. Which is to say, instead of knowing how to code the process, you can build the process alongside it, explain the end goal to it, and then let it figure out the best way to go about accomplishing it. I’ve found already that very often the solution to problems is much, much simpler than I thought it was and I only expect that trend to continue forever.

Step 2 - How To Do This

There are a million ways to skin this particular cat, so I’m just gonna give the basic one:

1. Sign up for Chat-GPT’s monthly subscription ($20/month which is wild cheap when you put it up against hours of work saved)

2. Follow the steps below to turn on Plug-Ins for your account and browse the (free) store.

After that, you can explore and try all sorts of stuff that’s pretty incredible honestly. Some great places to start are the plug-ins that plan trips for you via Kayak, automate tasks through Bardeen or Zapier, or build reading lists for you based on topics or titles you’ve read recently and are really excited to explore further.

Super fun and honestly incredibly valuable stuff when it comes to performing at a high level at work or increasing output without having to infringe on your hobbies or passions etc. I’ve never used it to write this newsletter because I really enjoy the process itself of writing it and of writing in general, but I’ve certainly started using it for all sorts of other things and I’m very interested to see if this ends up helping us get out of the modern societal hellscape or shoves us into a deeper one. Stay tuned!