The Busy Human’s Guide to Using AI (And Staying Only Mildly Brain Dead)

One hand in the oven, one hand on the phone, and AI keeping him alive.

Using AI Like a Busy Human (Who Has Absolutely No Time for Nonsense)

Look, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: AI is not here to replace you. It’s here to keep you from screaming into a dish towel at 11:47 PM because you forgot to thaw the chicken.

I’ve been using AI long enough now that it’s basically a coworker who never clocks out, never judges me, and occasionally suggests things that make me question its understanding of human life. And honestly? That’s part of the charm.

Over the past year, I’ve built a whole ecosystem around this chaos — including a brand‑new project called AI for Busy Humans, which is basically a survival kit for anyone who wants to use AI without becoming a full‑time “prompt engineer” (a job title that sounds fake but somehow pays real money).

But before we get there, let’s talk about how this all actually started.

The Ping-Pong Architecture: How I Built AI for Busy Humans

The Ping‑Pong Workflow Behind AI for Busy Humans

Building a website used to feel like a solitary construction project. You’d open a blank CMS, stare at the cursor, and hope the “About” page didn’t read like a tax form. But with my latest project, AI for Busy Humans, the process felt less like construction and more like a fast-paced game of ping-pong.

Not just me and an AI — but a three-way volley between Gemini, Copilot, and the part of my brain that still remembers how Hugo templates work. (OK, that last bit is slightly untrue: Copilot actually suggested using Hugo and walked me through the setup, including the first batch of pages that would later be refined.)

Mr. T’s Fitness Tracker: The Tiny Web Page That Became a Four‑Sheet, Multi‑API, AI‑Fueled Data Pipeline

I swear I didn’t mean for this to happen.

All I wanted was a simple little web page — a public accountability nudge, a digital sticky note that said, “Hey Tony, did you move your body today or nah.” Something tiny. Something honest. Something that would quietly roast me if I skipped too many days.

For months I’d been posting my daily walks on Facebook — a little ritual of “proof of life” updates that kept me honest. It worked, but it was clunky. Manual. Too dependent on me remembering to actually post. I wanted something automatic, something that lived on its own, something that didn’t require me to open Facebook like it was a confessional booth.

But the universe knows me too well.

Give me a “simple” idea and I will immediately turn it into a multi‑API, OAuth‑refreshing, Google‑Apps‑Script‑powered, domain‑hopping, spreadsheet‑layered contraption involving two AI models, four sheets, and a data architecture diagram that looks like a subway map.

This is the story of Mr. T’s Fitness Tracker — the page, the pipeline, the chaos, and the weirdly personal satisfaction of shipping something that absolutely should not exist and yet very much does.