AI Helps You Build Personal Tools Faster
lemire · x · 2026-07-16
The author reflects on several personal automation cases: a friend spent days manually processing hundreds of high-quality images in Photoshop, while the author finished the same job in 15 minutes using an ImageMagick script. For their child's early algebra and grammar learning, the author also built several small JavaScript teaching tools.
The core message is: one of AI's most important values is helping you build personal tools faster and better. When the author needed to batch-process video subtitles last night, instead of relying on off-the-shelf software, they had AI build an automation tool that quickly delivered usable results.
The conclusion: rather than always manually using generic software, it's better to build software tailored to your personal needs; AI has drastically lowered the barrier to doing this.
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