Superpowers

Hello again my friend,

You've seen the posts. The LinkedIn gurus telling you AI is going to take your job. The tech bros saying it'll make you a millionaire by Sunday. The consultants selling you a course on prompting.

And if you’re like me, you’ve been stuck figuring out how much of it is real, how much is bullshit, and whether it’s worth investing time into figuring it out for yourself. After finally investing that time, I can tell you that it might’ve been nonsense last year. Now, there’s some truth to it.

But it’s rare for people to share real details about what they’re doing, in a way an everyday, non-technical person can understand. Everyone's got an opinion. Almost nobody's showing you their actual day.

So that's what this is. Not a prediction. Not a pitch. Just what AI has genuinely done to my work, my output, and what I can build now, from someone who's in it every day.

Why? Because I just watched a coworker of mine complete works (that I thought would take months) in literally two days. I sat there in disbelief for a solid few minutes. It’s incredible, and insane at the same time. No, I’m not on that level yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. But it made me realize very quickly that the gap is widening, and I’d prefer to stay on the side using tech to do so much more. If you do to, this post is for you.

Let's lock in.

There's a split happening right now that most people aren't talking about honestly.

Think about the early internet. Some people figured out online banking, tap to pay, booking flights from their phone. Others kept going to the bank in person to pay their bills. Both groups had access to the same technology.

One group just used it, and the other didn't, and that gap quietly compounded into a very different relationship with time, convenience, and capability. That's exactly where we are with AI right now. Two groups of people, same access, very different lives.

To a certain extent, it’s always been in this. Recall the story of the truck driver who went to the USC library, made copies of all the film-making students papers, and taught himself film-making. That man was James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic, etc).

The difference is that it’s not that hard anymore. Anyone can download Claude, pay the $20, and try it. Meaning the groups are becoming more distinct, and the group using the tech well grows every day (adding pressure on everyone else).

A big part of writing this is to really encourage you to start using the technology.

The best way I can describe it: I have a someone on my team with superpowers. Fast. Smart. Never tired. Never precious about their work. Can code, write, and keep me organized without complaints.

That's not a metaphor. That's genuinely how I think about it. Not a tool I open when I need something. A collaborator I work with every single day. It’s terrifying to say it like this, because it’s like talking about a person, but it’s not.

At beehiiv, my role has quietly shifted in ways I didn't fully notice until I looked back. I used to spend serious time writing PRDs, bug reports, release notes, all of it. Now Claude writes the first draft and I edit and refine. What used to take a few hours takes twenty minutes. It doesn’t matter that it’s obviously AI. My boss in a meeting looked at the doc and literally said “holy Claude.”

The bug fixing thing surprised me most. I'm a PM. Typically, people in my role are not ‘supposed to be’ fixing bugs. But now I am. CSS issues, logic problems, backend stuff, because I can describe what's broken conversationally and work through it with AI until it's resolved. I'm not a developer. I just have a good one on call.

The ceiling on what I can contribute in a day has moved up significantly. I've more than doubled my output without adding more hours. It’s scary because I’m just scratching the surface.

I built an app called Stacko. Receipt tracking for Canadian small businesses. Users upload a receipt, AI reads it, logs the amounts, extracts taxes, it has CRA category mapping, PDF export for your accountant. It's live at app.stacko.ca. About a dozen or so of my friends and family are using it. Let me know if you use it and I’ll flip on the business-oriented features for you, otherwise it’s just for personal expenses.

I built it on weekends. Again, I’m not a developer.

Here's what the process actually looked like: I was the vision. I described what I wanted, the logic, the experience, the edge cases. Claude coded it, helped me think through the backend, debugged with me when things broke. I wasn't writing raw code. I was directing, deciding, and problem-solving with a bunch of screenshots saying “what do I do now?”

The day Stacko actually worked, receipts uploading, taxes extracting, the whole thing functioning like a real product, was the day something shifted for me. I wasn't just using AI to go faster. I was doing something I genuinely could not have done before. That's a different feeling entirely because I went from spending hours every week logging receipts and bills to…not.

Before this, something like Stacko would have cost a few thousand dollars a year between accounting and bookkeeping fees (not including my time manually entering every dollar). I did it in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Yeah, I pay for Claude, but it does a lot more than just build Stacko. Life’s changed.

On the personal side, it's hard to describe without sounding like I'm exaggerating, so I'll just be specific.

There are days where I work on The Lumière making orders, write a newsletter draft, and push a Stacko update, all in the same session. That used to be impossible because each one of those things used to require its own dedicated block of focused time that I had to carve out of a week.

Now I get more done in one sit-down than I used to in a week. Not because I'm working harder. Because I have a better teammate who handles the execution while I stay focused on the decisions.

Anyone can do this. If you're curious about AI but haven't committed yet, I'm not going to give you a framework or a reading list.

Just open it. Start a conversation. Tell it what you're working on and see what comes back. That's it. The people getting the most out of AI right now aren't the most technical, they're the ones who stopped waiting for the right moment and just started.

The internet analogy is worth sitting with one more time. You didn't need a manual to start using your phone to pay bills, or use Google for everything. You just did it, and then you couldn't imagine going back.

That's where this goes. The only question is whether you're early or late.

Start today.

Thanks, as always, for reading.