With some recent changes in my business, I needed a clear picture of my business: website traffic (PostHog), search rankings (Google Search Console), newsletter performance (Drip), and social media (Buffer). Several of these platforms don’t make data export easy, so I used Claude Code to write scripts that scrape and export what I needed. This kind of thing is becoming approachable even for non-technical people. The LLM writes the code, you just run it. A useful side effect: those scripts now run on their own without any AI involvement.
Once I had the data, I had Claude analyze it alongside my business notes to produce a strategic overview and help me think through future directions. It covered an enormous amount of ground quickly. Most of the analysis was solid; where it was wrong, it wasn’t hard to correct. On my own, this would have taken most of a week.
What surprised me was how exhausting it was. A full day of AI-assisted strategic thinking left me more drained than a normal workday. Critical thinking at that intensity and volume is tiring, even with AI doing the heavy lifting on synthesis.
One unexpected outcome: while automating some tasks in Drip, I realized how much of their API is missing functionality I need, forcing workarounds with Playwright. Combined with cost and data sovereignty concerns, it’s increasingly the wrong tool for my needs. What struck me was how quickly Gemini surfaced better alternatives, a search that would have taken me hours took minutes. LLMs are making platform switching far less intimidating.
So it helped me do my strategic thinking faster and it will save me money when I dump drip this summer.
(I often chime in other topics to show the weaknesses of these tools, so I wanted to acknowledge the good as well.)
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That is a fascinating take on usefulness of AI. I have been using Claude more and really like the conversational tone compared to #cgpt.
We worked through a major policy revision in a matter of hours. I asked it to play devils advocate against its own reasoning and was impressed it actually did it!
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This is so important!
I noticed this when I moved into executive coaching, Mark (pre AI) - the level of thinking was exhausting.
At first I thought it was me - getting old! - but then I remembered something our dog trainer told us - if you want to exhaust the dog, don’t make them do lots of physical exercise, get them to play brain games instead (finding hidden treats, not playing Wordle), and they’ll sleep very well. It’s the same with humans.
Before that I’d never realised how draining hard thinking is. Or - more generally - how much the level of energy required varies according to the type of work we do. We know this is true with our laptops, and phones, but it’s also true of our brains. Big, clever, deep, broad, novel, strategic thinking is exhausting. Better done in bursts, spread over time, with consolidation time in between.
Thanks so much for sharing this Mark! It’s really timely for me, because a client is asking for help on how they use AI to increase their product management capacity, and they’re finding it’s not nearly as easy as using AI to do more coding. Their developers are suddenly way faster, but the other roles can’t keep up - it’s turned them into bottlenecks. And, unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of, say, hiring more product people, or getting them to use AI to help with product work, design, analysis, etc, because that stuff still requires our brains to keep up.
Interesting times!
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You might find my notes on Systems thinking and generative ai useful: Systems Thinking with GenAI: Solve Deep Team Problems
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I recently had a long chat with Claude concerning my part-time all vinyl 80’s music DJ business. I gave it all kinds of information. I uploaded my song and album list and it created a list of songs and records I may wish to add. I asked Claude to find local venues that I may be able to play at. It found several and then it developed a strategy for approaching these clubs / bars and even drafted a pitch letter. I was impressed and grateful for the relevence and power of its output. A real game changer for my business.
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I spent about a whole day having Claude generate 33 targeted resumes for me for jobs I was applying for. Then spent hours discussing my DJ business - it’s history and vibe - and Claude was extremely helpful. I was just buzzing and exhausted after this. It was my first long, deep AI chat session and was both exhilarating and taxing at the same time. My expectation is that with use and time these feelings will diminish.
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