I'm an AI convert. Kind of.

I have a love-hate relationship with AI, but it wasn't always that way. In fact, for most of the last few years, I hated it. More accurately, I hated the idea of it. As someone who wrote and created content for a living, I was scared of what ChatGPT and the like meant for my industry. What it meant for me.

So, as an act of defiance, I flat out didn't use any AI tools. If I didn't use it, it meant I couldn't be blamed for what felt like the impending doom of journalism.

My mindset towards AI as a whole has changed over the last year, and while I'm still skeptical of its broader impact, I've come to appreciate it.

There was never an Aha! moment

A few months after leaving tech journalism, I bought the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which came with a free year of Gemini Pro. Even with free access to Google's AI tool in the palm of my hand at all times, I still didn't want to touch any large language model-like tool. I'd mess with the photo editing/creation features once in a while, but that was about it.

My use of Gemini, and by extension AI tools as a whole, wasn't due to a breakthrough I had when using it one afternoon. Instead, it was a slow build, and over time, I started to ask Gemini for advice or help with random tasks.

For example, at one point early on in my AI journey, I shared a picture of my wife's plant and asked it to help us diagnose why it looked unhealthy and what we could do to help it. Neat, I thought. But I still wasn't sold.

Then while working on our dough recipe for Sips & Pies, I realized I needed a way to quickly and easily scale it up or down, based on that week's batch size. So, I asked Gemini to help me create a custom dough calculator. A few hours later, the official Sips & Pies Dough Calculator was up and running for anyone to use. The default values currently in the various fields are exactly what we use, too. Also neat.

From that point on, my use of Gemini, along with other AI tools like Claude, has been on an upward climb. I started opening Gemini every time I ran into an issue I couldn't easily find an answer for on Reddit. If one of my home servers was acting goofy or I wanted to enable a new feature, I'd ask Gemini to walk me through the process.

Slowly, Gemini kept earning my trust as a tool I could reach for when I wasn't sure how to get something technical done. And each time, I'd learn something, because Gemini not only told me how to do a task or fix the problem in front of me, but it explained what went wrong or the logic behind it.

I gladly pay for Gemini now

My free year of Gemini Pro ended in September, but I didn't cancel. I thought about it, but as I was debating whether or not it's worth $20 a month, I realized just how much I use it on an almost daily basis.

More recently, I've been using Gemini to help me develop various projects. I'm sorry – I've been using Gemini to vibe code various projects.

I spent over a month using Gemini (and to a lesser extent Claude Code) to create an Amazon bot. I'd feed the bot various product ASINs, it'd monitor for price drops, and if one was detected, it'd create an affiliate link and share it across several social networks.

It wasn't a new idea, by any means, but it is one I'd always wanted to try – and, for the most part, it was successful in the fact that it ran, hands free, for a month. The biggest hurdles that eventually lead to me turning the bot off was Amazon taking away my API access a few hours after turning it on due to a change in policy on their end, and the fact that most social networks really, really frown on bots auto sharing content. It was nearly impossible for random people to discover my links, and if I used personal accounts, I risked losing followers or reported as spam.

All told, think I made $23 on affiliate sales over the course of a month. It paid for Gemini, but not for access to Keepa's API. In the end, I lost $20 on the project, but I learned so much about coding, Github project management and many aspects of creating, maintaining and iterating on an idea.

That experience is why I've made it a goal of mine this year to release some form of an app. I have several ideas, I just need to commit to one. (I spent 10 minutes (!!) a few days ago creating an iPad app to manage and publish content on Ghost blogs. Seriously, it's scary how easy it is to get an app started.)

It's not all about tech and vibe coding

Gemini hasn't been solely a tech-related tool. Just yesterday we woke up to hear our furnace start for a second, then stop, then start again, then stop. Eventually it'd turn on and stay on, but something wasn't right.

In the past, I would have opened Safari, type in a vague description of what was happening into the Google search bar, and spent 20 minutes reading through forum or Reddit threads, watched a handful of YouTube videos, and then tried to guess what the real problem was. Hoping an internet stranger didn't lead me astray.

However, in just a few seconds Gemini told me two different possible issues based on my lengthy description, complete with instructions about how to narrow down the root cause, and then what the fix for each issue was. In the end, it was a bad flame sensor I was able to replace, on my own, without calling a repairman.

The entire interaction reminded me of a column I wrote for Fortune (paywalled now) back in 2014 where I talked about my own experience of relying on YouTube to teach me to how to do things that, traditionally at least, Dad's taught their kids. I even interviewed several executives about their use of YouTube in the same way.

I could go on with countless examples of when I've turned Gemini and walked away with more knowledge and familiarity with a task or topic in a shorter amount of time than if I had decided to do the research on my own.

A tool, not a replacement

That said, I still have some hard lines of what I will and won't use AI for. The biggest one, of course, is using AI to write any of my work for me. I don't use it for that, at all. And I probably never will.

Writing should be personal, not robotic.

To me, AI is a powerful tool I can turn to when I'm not entirely sure how accomplish a task, or – and this is probably the most appealing aspect to me – when I want to learn about a topic I know virtually nothing about. It'll hold my hand, if needed, and walk me through the finer points and bigger details. It's not perfect, and I'm still very skeptical overall of how this all plays out, but I've come to terms with the fact that AI is now a part of my daily workflow.

Now if I could just figure out how to get my kids to stop telling my wife Gemini is my real girlfriend. Any advice?