27 ways I actually use AI

People ask me what I actually use AI for. The honest answer is "almost everything, a little." That is not helpful to someone who has never tried it.

So I asked Claude to go back through our work together and list every kind of thing we have done. It came back with 27. Each one is now its own short post, built around a real example.

These are about how I use AI. For the tools and games themselves, see the project write-ups on the At work and At home pages.

How to read these

Pick the one closest to your own life. Each post follows the same pattern: what the situation was, what I asked, what came back and where it fell short. I kept that last part in every post on purpose.

If you only read one, read When the AI is wrong, and when it says no.

At work

I manage a City Transit division. Most of this is the unglamorous part of the job.

• Getting a straight answer on a regulation
• A sanity check before you call the attorney
• Turning what you see in the field into a business case
• Asking AI what a document is missing
• Everyday email: tone, humor and the question you forgot to answer
• Writing a careful public reply
• Checklists, flyers and forms in an afternoon
• Building a procedure library and closing audit findings
• Untangling grant money before a deadline
• Turning a policy into a tool
• A consultant-grade plan from documents already on hand
• Building the case for a new service, then rebuilding it
• Preparing for a hard meeting in an hour
• Checking the numbers before you reply
• Building custom software without being a professional developer
• Organizing the work itself
• Community partnerships and a coloring app
• When the AI is wrong, and when it says no

At home

• Building games for my kid
• A hometown bus simulator from real map data
• A father-son comic book about physics
• Standing up a website in a weekend
• Pure fun: a goat racer trailer and texts to my dad
• Small life questions
• Hobbies and volunteering: sailing scores and a club website
• Chasing a big idea, and letting AI poke holes in it
• Following curiosity into hard math

What I left out

Anything that is not mine to share. That means personnel matters, legal matters and anything that should come from the City itself. Two of the work posts come from situations like that. I wrote those with the details removed and kept only the method.

How these posts were written

Claude drafted all of them from the record of our conversations, in my voice. The examples are real. If something reads wrong, that is on me to fix, and I will.

Nothing here is an official statement from my employer.