2 and a half years in, and I still love AI for simply asking a question or creating a prompt, having an interactive experience, voice or text, and getting voice or text back. How AI reaches into GUIs for me and helps me out. How I create useful tools for myself.
These days I'm deep, deep in Claude world! I've built a local second brain with it: a register of nearly 2,000 facts about my life, a voice profile checked against emails I've actually sent, and separate chats that each know their own part of my life. Under that there's over 40 scripts, 10 custom skills, and 15 hooks I call gates, which check Claude's work before it reaches me. One stops it stating a fact about me it hasn't looked up, one stops visual instructions like "cook until golden brown", one catches disability used as a metaphor, and one stops it telling me it can't do something before it's actually tried. So I'm not explaining myself over and over.
Every morning at half eight a brief lands in my inbox, written for my screen reader: my calendar for today and tomorrow, anything due or overdue, replies I've been waiting on by email or LinkedIn, new invitations and messages, job leads twice a week, and a heads-up if anything in my setup has broken. I've also a live guide to my Canadian PR application, where every fact carries where it came from and the date it was checked, and it gets updated after every session.
Just this past while it's built me a plugin that makes Discord usable with VoiceOver after four years of me struggling with it, pulled a QR code out of a screenshot when my laptop screen was broken, built Windows 11 onto a 2012 MacBook Pro over the network, put Linux on an old HP laptop without a USB stick so I can reach it from anywhere over Tailscale with Orca talking, and read my dog's vet report to me in full the morning it arrived. It turned a Kindle book I'd bought, with no audiobook out there, into one, chapter by chapter, in a voice I picked myself. And it rebuilt the official CPACC Body of Knowledge ePub so its 94 bold lines became 277 proper headings I can move through.
Can I do it without AI? Mostly, until I come across an A11Y barrier that, no matter what OS or screen reader I use, I can't get past. I could jump through the hundreds of hoops like I've done when working in IT, under pressure, under the gun of discrimination, and feeling not always like a colleague but a pain in the arse disabled person. But now, with sore fingers, Long Covid brain fog and being totally Blind, I don't have to.
No doubt there's ethical and moral issues with AI to be worked on. But there's always been issues with every new tech, and these are just different ones. Fast evolving, yup, but there's always bloody something, ya know?