Turning Ugh Into Wheee

Here's an underappreciated aspect of using AI for (certain) tasks: it can turn dreadful drudgery into something fun. Never mind concrete calculations of your return on investment, or time spent. If it makes it more delightful to do some parts of your job, it's a win in my book.

Concrete example from my work: Yet another migration and rejigging of code on a client project, where we had to remove one dependency in favour of another. Before AI, this would have involved lots of easy but also easy-to-get-wrong steps paired with a constant worry of having missed something. With Claude Code, I decided on the phases, had Claude come up with a plan, and then executed it. And because my mind wasn't focused on the nitty-gritty, I actually enjoyed the experience and reaping the rewards.

And because of that experience, I see myself more inclined to embark on other "well, someone has to do it eventually" tasks that, before, weren't particularly exciting precisely because the ratio of high-level smart thinking to low-level execution was out of whack. But if the AI takes care of the low-level execution, it's back to pure fun.

So when you're thinking about where you might want to try AI in your life, look for areas with that out-of-whack fun/drudgery ratio. Could they be made to be pure fun?