It AIn't Magic.

Some people think AI is magic. Others think it's overhyped hullabaloo. They're both wrong. But to see AI for what it really is, you need a problem — the kind that requires a lot of boring, repetitive work to fix something. The kind of monotonous work that would ruin your afternoon on an otherwise pleasant day.

Recently, I had just such a problem; and it changed how I think about AI.

The Book That Started It

The other day I tracked down a book I'd been looking for — one of those searches where you're glad to find it at all. The only copy I could find was a PDF. That's fine for a lot of things, but I prefer EPUB format for my e-reader because it just works better. I knew there were online tools to convert one to the other, so I ran it through one. What came back was a mess.

Stray numbers floating in the middle of sentences. The chapter title repeating every few paragraphs. Paragraphs broken in random places for no apparent reason. The words were all there but it was really difficult to read. The conversion program had made a few hundred small mistakes throughout the file. I knew I could fix them by hand, but that was going to take the better part of my Saturday afternoon.

Like I said, I wanted that book. So I got ready to hack through the files and tidy everything up... But something made me think that there had to be a better way.

The Better Way

I decided to give AI a shot, so I opened up Claude Code — an AI tool that can actually work with files on your computer — and described the problem the same way I’d describe it to a person:"Hey, here's what's wrong with this file. Can you fix it?"

Fifteen minutes later, I had a clean, pleasantly-readable book.

Not Magic. Just Tireless.

The AI didn't do anything I couldn't have done myself — that's the point. It just did it without getting bored, without losing focus, and without the small mistakes that creep in when you're two hours into a job like that. Whatever logic it applied to the first problem it applied to the last one, exactly the same way. That's the actual advantage. Not brilliance — stamina.

This Pattern Is Everywhere

The e-book story is specific, but the pattern behind it isn't. Most people have a version of this problem lurking somewhere in their to-do list — a photo library that's gotten out of hand, a pile of receipts that needs sorting. Not complicated problems. Just big ones — the kind that eat your afternoon while you could be doing something else. Once you've seen AI handle one of those, the question stops being "is AI useful?" and becomes "what else have I been doing by hand that I didn't have to?"