Kaizen via AI - Part II

ChatGPT: My New Daily Driver

I’ve found myself using ChatGPT a lot more than Claude lately. Not because I consciously decided to switch, but because it kept showing up as useful in ways that were hard to ignore. Image generation was the initial pull. I tried it once, got intrigued, then kept coming back. It’s not the only tool I use, but it’s become a daily companion for more than one type of task.

As a Scratchpad

This blog post? It started as a two-minute ramble into ChatGPT while I was sitting in the car. I’ve been treating it like a rolling notebook that actually understands structure. It helps me capture ideas, polish messy thoughts, and convert short bursts of input into something coherent. It’s surprisingly good at cleaning up the rough edges — ums, backtracks, and half-finished ideas all come out the other end more refined.

As a Scriptwriter

I needed to create a product advertisement recently, and we joked internally about doing it in a TV infomercial style. I asked ChatGPT to draft a script, and it absolutely nailed the vibe. It helped unblock the creative process, gave me a launchpad, and made the whole thing more fun to think about.

As an Unexpected Animation Assistant

For a recent product demo, I needed to create some custom animations. I assumed I’d need to dive into Blender or Canva — tools I’m not especially familiar with. I asked ChatGPT for options, and it suggested Manim, a Python animation library I hadn’t considered. Turns out, writing Python is way faster for me than fumbling through a GUI. I was able to build something tailored, reproducible, and exactly what I needed — no new toolchain required.

Cursor: Great for Prototypes, Not for the Finish Line

I spend a good chunk of my day in Cursor, using AI to help scaffold ideas and code up demos. For disposable work, it’s fantastic. It helps me move quickly, iterate fast, and test wild ideas without much investment.

But the experience doesn’t scale linearly. Once the surface area of the code grows or the interdependencies start to stack up, I end up fighting it more than I benefit from it. There’s a steep drop-off in usefulness once the work stops being disposable.

Vercel V0: Inspiration-on-Demand

One evening, while walking to dinner, I had an idea for a landing page we’d been meaning to build. Instead of jotting it down, I opened up V0, typed in my idea, and closed the app. After dinner, I reopened it to find that it had built a functional draft layout from my prompt. That’s the kind of acceleration that turns random inspiration into progress, with zero disruption to what I was actually doing.

Gemini: Solid Market Research Acceleration

We’ve been testing Gemini’s deep research capabilities while working on a new product. We asked it to act like a world-class marketer and write a market research report and execution plan. I gave it minimal context at first, just to see what it came up with, and then refined it with more details over time.

It didn’t blow our minds, but it absolutely saved time. Especially for outlining content plans, summarizing positioning, and organizing the landscape. Nothing strategic came out of it that we hadn’t already discovered through our own user research, but for compressing hours into minutes? Not bad at all.

Blender (via MCP): Building with My Kids in Roblox

My kids are into Roblox, and we decided to try making some custom assets together. We started with an avatar and used the Blender MCP server to generate the base model from a simple prompt. None of us had used Blender before, and to be honest I hadn’t spent much time in Roblox Studio either, but it worked.

Now we’re at the “finishing touches” stage, which means I’m learning Blender properly to tweak things. It’s a familiar pattern: AI gets you 90% of the way there, but the last 10% still needs human finesse. That said, it was a great intro for the kids, and it gave them a taste of what’s possible. They don’t fully appreciate how magical that is yet. But I do.

MCP Servers: My Personal Workflow OS

I’ve been quietly building out a suite of small MCP servers to automate and organize my day.

Meeting Prep with LinkedIn Context

One of them helps me get ready for meetings by pulling in calendar events, filtering out internal attendees, and then using a browser automation layer to visit external participants’ LinkedIn profiles and summarize their backgrounds. It saves me from scrambling five minutes before a call and gives me more context than I’d have time to dig up manually.

Tab Management at Scale

Another one helps me manage the 355 browser tabs I currently have open (yes, really). Every one of them represents something I’m definitely going to get to eventually. To avoid drowning in them, I built a browser MCP server that lets me search, organize, and re-surface specific pages.

Even better, I can just tell Claude something like:
“Open the browser tab that contains the Google sales document.”
And it’ll go find it and bring it to the front.

It’s a small thing, but that kind of tool feels like a productivity superpower. Especially when you’re balancing deep work with fragmented attention.

Voice and Motion: Multitasking Without Losing the Thread

One of the subtler benefits of all these tools is how they let me move while still making progress. I can capture ideas as they come to me. Whether that’s narrating thoughts into ChatGPT, firing off a V0 prompt between errands, or quickly slotting a distraction into a tool that does something with it while I focus elsewhere.

Instead of losing momentum or letting inspiration evaporate, I can drop ideas into a system that keeps working while I shift gears. Sometimes it writes something. Sometimes it builds something. Sometimes it just holds the thought until I can return to it.

It’s not just a better productivity model — it’s a more humane one. Fewer tabs in my brain. More room for the real work.

Final Thoughts

All of this fits into the same theme I wrote about previously: continuous improvement, low-friction experimentation, and getting comfortable with tools that don’t need to be perfect to be powerful. It’s not about outsourcing everything. It’s about keeping momentum, reducing friction, and buying back time.

And maybe the most surprising part? This feels more human, not less. I’m spending less time on setup and overhead, and more time thinking, building, and talking to people. That’s a trade I’ll keep making.

Published: 09/05/2025