AI Didn’t Make Me Work Less. It Made Me Work Better.

Build in Public · #8

Most people are using AI to do less: mass-produce content, cut corners, coast. Understandable; it’s new. But this past month I’ve worked harder than I have in years, and produced the best work of my career. That’s the part nobody’s selling you. Here’s how it actually went.

I get why people reach for AI to work less. The tools are new, the hype is loud, and “type a prompt, get 50 articles” is a seductive pitch. But it produces slop, and everyone can feel it.

I went the other way. I used AI to work better: higher quality, evergreen quality, the kind of asset you build once and it keeps paying. Not less work. Better work. Here’s the month that changed how I see all of it.

I led with my strengths, and bought myself time

I didn’t start with the hard stuff. I started with what I’m fast at: building small, sellable tools. In a few weeks, with Claude, I knocked out enough Chrome extensions (each one finished, with sales copy, funnel mapping, the works) to cover eight months of weekly launches. (Here’s the full month-one scorecard, the actual receipts, updated monthly.)

That’s the move most people miss. Getting those done first didn’t just make money; it bought me time. Time to do the harder, slower, more valuable things without the pressure of “what am I launching this week?” hanging over every decision.

Then I rebuilt the things I’d had to walk away from

With that runway, I turned to the tools I’d been forced to retire over the years. I took the first two (honestly, among the hardest to rebuild) and got them done fast. That wasn’t about revenue. That was about buying customer patience, and hopefully trust, showing the people who’d bought from me years ago that I still stand behind the work.

None of this happened because I’m smarter than anyone. It happened because of how I’ve always worked: I see evolution, progression, momentum, organization, and getting those foundations right is exactly what frees my mind to focus on the creative part. AI didn’t change my nature. It removed the ceiling on it.

The site was where I first saw the ecosystem

Rebuilding the website was the eye-opener. What started as “make a nicer site” turned into the first glimpse of an actual ecosystem forming. One morning I was deep in plugins (adding, removing, optimizing settings I used to avoid) and somewhere in there I realized I needed to see everything at a glance, or I’d lose the thread. So I started building artifacts: dashboards, checklists, boards. Instruments.

Once I could see it, I could shape it. Tweak it. Improve it. The whole thing stopped being a to-do list and became a system I was designing.

It runs like a small team, and I’m the co-creator

Today the whole operation lives across five Claude Code chats, with one sitting as HQ, coordinating and handing me a prioritized to-do list. It’s almost like running a small-team business where I’m the co-creator with Claude, and my actual small team can tap straight in, because everything is laid out and explained. Less man-management. More people moving the same direction. Even the content mapping, the generation, the optimization, the internal linking, all of it is a level beyond how I was working just a month ago.

That’s the difference. AI didn’t let me do less. It let me do more of what actually moves the needle, at a quality I couldn’t hit before, and build something evergreen while I did it. The site truly is a cornerstone asset now, not a brochure but an engine.

Real-time proof, as I write this

Here’s how alive this is: right now, my daughter Stephanie has a launch running, so I’ve deliberately held mine back. I pushed SERP Gap down the queue so we’re not competing. I taught her this same path (products, launches, building a buyers list) and she’s very good now; she just landed WarriorPlus Deal of the Day. I helped her funnel by handing over a couple of my Chrome extensions to run as upsells, plus the framework. We start selling my stuff again in a few days. That’s the rhythm now.

My Take: The lie in the AI gold rush is that it’s a shortcut to doing less. Used that way, it makes slop, and slop is worthless. Used the other way, to hold a higher standard, build real assets, and design systems instead of one-off outputs, it’s the biggest leverage of my career. AI doesn’t replace the work. It rewards the people who bring an attitude of evolution and momentum to it, and quietly punishes the ones looking for an easy button. Work better, not less. That’s the whole game.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: I’m going to teach all of this, live, in the workshops. The system, the attitude, the whole build. Because once you’ve seen it work, you’re not missing information anymore. You’re just one decision away. Take action and build your own, or soak up another inspiring story and drift to the next shiny thing in your inbox. That part’s on you.

Crazy that it all started with one tweet, huh?