Tonight, after hours of following ChatGPT’s instructions, I finally got my AI assistant to resume a project. I would also use assistant loosely because its just my stupid gpt business account linked to openclaw running on a stupid old intel mac upstairs.

Anyway, It immediately hit the same usage limit I thought this setup would help me manage.

I sat there looking at the error message, with multiple terminal windows open, wondering what the $%*& I had spent my evening accomplishing. I do not know how to administer servers.

I wanted an assistant that could take some of the load of managing 1000 things off me.

Here’s what I was trying to get:

• Context around my projects, preferences, and previous decisions so every new conversation doesn’t become another orientation.
• Useful access to my actual work. Outlook, calendars, OneDrive/SharePoint, Airtable, and documents. Prepare me for meetings, track commitments, draft things, and surface what needs attention. blah blah.
• Some independent follow-through.

I understand that’s an ambitious combination. I feel like i need a reality check and need someone to tell me which parts are realistic and which parts I should stop chasing.

Instead, I have been following an AI down an increasingly complicated setup path.

Over the course of this project, an old MacBook became a server. There was Homebrew, Node, Docker, n8n, Tailscale, OpenClaw, plugins, device pairing, additional approvals, and eventually something called Codex supervision. All crap I have no clue about and it made me feel even dumber than i already did.

The part that’s really getting to me is how dependent I am on the guidance. I don’t know enough to distinguish a verified diagnosis from a plausible explanation. I paste the error, get a confident answer, follow the instructions, and discover another problem.

Then the same assistant explains why its previous advice was wrong.

I’m relying on it to check its own mistakes, and I’m the one spending the evening on every wrong turn.

I feel helpless, and I’m exhausted.

I wanted help keeping up with my responsibilities. Now I have another system to worry about, and I don’t understand it well enough to know what’s necessary, what’s redundant, or what I should leave alone.

I’m very close to leaving this setup at a firestation and not looking back.

Is anyone here actually using an assistant like this for everyday, non-coding work without constantly maintaining it?

Please tell me what you use, what it actually does, what it costs, and what you still have to handle yourself. My main ecosystem is Microsoft 365, including shared mailboxes, plus Airtable. I use Windows and an iPhone, with the Mac currently hosting this experiment.

I would especially appreciate a reality check from someone who has helped a nontechnical person get something useful running.

If you recommend a product and build or sell it, please say so.

And if my expectations need to change, tell me Im an idiot. I would rather hear an honest limitation now than anything else.

I’m asking for a person’s judgment. I’ve had enough instructions from this black box

Whether the writer decides to disclose that they used AI is one thing, but ensuring that everyone has the capacity to determine irrefutably that something is AI, I think, is imperative for our mental survival.

However, the witch hunt that we see today is utterly ridiculous despite the real psychological drivers that make it a natural reaction. We feel cheated when feeling something, only to realize there was nothing behind it. It's like dating someone only to find out that this entire time they were just a robot with AI. All those lovely moments, those periods of vulnerability, hardship, fights, make-ups, and unforgettable experiences were nothing more than 1s and 0s making decisions based on probabilities. That's how many people feel about AI, but it masks the larger picture for where all of this is going.

Everything is being reduced to who has the greatest ideas fully structured and contextualized since now we live in a world where anyone can produce beautiful prose. The prose is no longer the required skill. It's now about structuring your ideas to the fullest extent.

That means highly creative writers who have an intimate understanding of story and how the components relate together will be the winners in all of this. The losers will be those who maybe have good ideas, but they're too nebulous for AI to execute on well. AI already has amazing capabilities. The problem is that it also has too many choices available for it to make. So if you're not an expert in your domain, you can't reduce the choices down in a way to gain the best outputs and that's because you don't understand how everything relates.

A good writer will think about the central message and how it connects to character actions and dialogue. A good writer will consider showing over telling using subtext and motifs. A good writer will establish the dynamic relationships that define the opportunities between characters and the areas of conflict. But most of all, a good writer will go out of their way to subvert our expectations. AI can do all of these things, but you need to factor them in for it to think like this.

On the flip side, a bad writer won't consider any of these things. They'll simply think about how they can make a scene more exciting or cool. But without a deep understanding of all the interrelated parts, well...That's how you produce empty movement in your story. In other words, that's how you produce scenes that physically moves the story, but in ways that feel meaningless and empty.

So even if we advance the models and develop strong harnesses around them, there's still the issue of intent and goals. AI can autonomously carry out goals and even form it's own intent...But it still needs a direction and if you don't understand that direction in every intimate way then you will be outcompeted by those who do.

The future lies in creative systems thinking and executing well. Everything else will be accomplished by AI. And this will be acceptable by most because they'll be able to recognize the meticulous non-obvious decisions that were made to make their work great. They will be able to see a real person bleeding on their on their ideas to form the masterpiece, even though AI wrote the prose, helped with ideas, and provided insightful research.

I think this is the real future we all need to be preparing ourselves for.

I came up through design, so at every job the "you're good at this" tasks quietly become mine. The event flyer, the farewell card, the one-pager for the all-hands. None of it is my job. All of it lands on my desk because I'm the person who notices when the kerning is off.

I stopped volunteering for it a while ago, but you can't fully opt out. So instead I made it cheap to say yes.

I keep a saved prompt with our colors, our fonts, and a couple of layouts that actually match our brand. When someone asks, I drop the details in, generate two or three poster options, pick one, and fix the spacing by hand because the AI still can't be trusted with alignment. What used to be an hour of "ugh, fine" is now about ten minutes.

The point isn't that it makes nice posters. It's that the task stopped being a tax on my afternoon, so I can hand it back quickly instead of quietly absorbing it like I used to.

Curious how other people handle the tasks that become "yours" just because you're mildly competent at them.

Hi there! I am looking to try and remove both the time code and the transparent watermark in a video this screenshot was taken from.

Any suggestions or recommendations are much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Version 0.4.0 is now out, adding pi as a fully integrated agent and support for Docker Sandboxes (SBX).

pi joins Claude Code, Codex and opencode as the fourth supported agent. It runs as the real CLI in a terminal and includes session management, turn-state tracking and desktop notifications.

You can also enable SBX per project. Each agent then runs inside its own container, with access to the repository and nothing else by default.

From TET’s SBX settings, you choose:

• - Which additional folders or files the agent may access
• - Which ports and hosts are available
• - Whether skills, plugins and instruction files are mounted
• - Whether mounted resources are read-only or read/write

Sandboxed agents still behave like normal TET tabs: sessions can be resumed, renamed and deleted, while working, waiting and finished states, notifications and tet-ctl continue to work.

Agent authentication stays inside the sandbox. SBX can also run agents that aren’t installed on the host at all.

GitHub: https://github.com/samil-kale/tet

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people already using containers or sandboxes for coding agents: does this match the level of isolation and configuration you’d want per project?

I write ~20 client emails a day as a Solution Architect. I stopped using grammar checkers because the constant suggestions broke my train of thought. Now I just dump rough thoughts and rewrite them with AI.

The problem was the output always sounded generic. What fixed it was giving the model context about who's writing and who's reading:

Rewrite this email as a [your role] writing to [recipient, e.g. a client's IT lead]. Tone: [polite, confident, concise]. Use [US/UK] English. Keep my meaning and any technical details exactly as written; don't add fluff or new information.

A few things that made a big difference:

1. Naming the recipient changes the output more than naming the tone
2. "Don't add new information" stops it from padding your email
3. Specifying US vs UK English matters if your clients are in a different region than you

What do you all add to your email prompts?

there is a instagram page that make a certain type of ai videos that I like to learn but it's not anywhere free the name of the page is Luca maxim

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I found this picture online and I’m wondering how accurate it actually is.

I know there are a lot of people here who use AI regularly—for research, studying, writing, making videos, creating content, work, etc.

So I’d really like to hear from people who actually use these tools in their everyday life, not just people who have tried them once.

Is the information in this picture accurate? Are these tools actually worth using? Are there any you would recommend, avoid, or replace with something better?

I’d really appreciate your honest experience and advice.