Your Thinking Can’t Be Automated: Use AI as a Tool not a Crutch

Chris Lettieri
The Augmented Engineer
2 min readJan 28, 2024

Anyone promising you quick, easy results with AI is doing it wrong.

There is an endless sea of crap content promising you can make $5,342 in a week using ChatGPT.

And tomorrow someone makes the next video showing you how to make $7,854 in a day!

This is the trash reality TV equivalent of how use AI, your wasting your time listening to this stuff.

AI can be a superpower if you are still willing to do the hard work of thinking.

AI Can’t Think For You

You need to do the hard work of thinking through the problem and then using AI as a tool.

AI can’t handle big open questions, it can respond to them but it won’t solve them for you. At least not in any meaningful way. To get something useful from AI, you need to be specific with what you are asking.

The only way to get this clarity from AI is if you think deeply about what you need it to do.

AI Shortcuts Are Wasting Your Time

Your time is more valuable than having ChatGPT write you a book which contributes nothing to the world and no one will read.

Don’t look for shortcuts with AI.

Continue to be a hard worker and AI will supercharge your productivity. Spend your time thinking deeply about a problem. Distill it down into specific pieces that you can ask AI to help with. This frees you to spend more time thinking about the next step.

Use AI to do something unique, something special, something hard, something worthy of other peoples time.

Don’t take shortcuts, learn how to become an Augmented Engineer.

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Chris Lettieri
The Augmented Engineer

Trader turned data engineer, building deep neural networks on time series data. I like second brains and podcasting @ (https://bitsofchris.com).