Hey everyone,

Today I'm open sourcing my AI operating system—the mental framework I’ve developed for using AI in my work.

This post was born out of my conviction for how transformative this technology is going to be, and to be frank, how transformative it's already been for my productivity.

As always, if you find today’s post thought provoking, forward it to a friend.

My AI Operating System

AI insecurity

“Using AI and outsourcing grunt work isn’t ‘cheating’ but strategic leverage.”

That's what I wrote as item seven on the list of the 24 things I learned in 2024.

That learning was forged from two years of tinkering with AI tools. While it seems fairly obvious, it took an ungodly amount of mental back and forth to settle on this principle.

To give you context on how I settled on it, we have to go back to when ChatGPT was first released.

I remember the first time I ever prompted ChatGPT. I asked a technical question about Bitcoin and moved very quickly to asking it to explain black holes within the same chat.

Because of how flawlessly it answered me, it was the first time I was truly mind-blown by technology, let alone a fairly simple-looking software tool.

That night, I was extremely excited about what it meant for the world and how this tool was going to change it, which it is currently doing. However, interestingly enough, that excitement was overshadowed by trepidation.

I became scared and intimidated by the tool and the potential for what it could do.

Although I was using it regularly for my work, I had a large amount of insecurity about using it, fearing that I had lost the ability to think critically and that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was because I had to rely on this supposedly intelligent tool that was able to predict what the next word in the sentence really well.

Many of you might have felt or still feel the same way. But I’ll explain how this thinking is illogical and utterly misplaced at best.

And the best thing is, you won't have to take my word for it. Just Jeff Bezos’ word.

Electricity 2.0

Jeff Bezos has repeatedly compared AI to electricity, a pervasive innovation that will supercharge (sorry, not sorry) the productivity of every industry imaginable.

As he puts it: “AI is a horizontal enabling layer. These horizontal layers, like electricity, and compute, and now artificial intelligence... They go everywhere.”

Meaning AI is not limited to one sector and will permeate and enhance every application and industry.

When I heard Bezos make this analogy for the first time, the timing was peculiar.

Just weeks before, I had listened to his appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast where 95%+ of the episode was dedicated to how he spends his time at Blue Origin building rockets and plotting the future of space travel.

It was fascinating to see his mentality turn 180 degrees so quickly. Weeks ago he’d been all in on building rockets. Now he was back at Amazon building in AI.

And if that timing wasn't eerie enough, Sergey Brin also emerged from hibernation, and news had broken of him being five days a week in the Google office, working on their own AI initiatives as they fought to keep up with OpenAI.

These two anecdotal data points, paired with my own conviction about how revolutionary these tools were going to be, led me to conclude that it would be silly of me not to pay more attention and go full AI-native in everything I do.

At that moment, I remember reflecting on my career choices up until that point—I’d half-arsed content creation on social media, been late to building in crypto, and made silly FOMO-driven decisions in that department.

I was not willing to miss this boat—possibly the biggest boat of my lifetime.

That’s why these AI tools are not just tools for me. They are my bread and butter system in my work. I essentially use them as a second brain, a sounding board for my thinking, and an inexpensive source of leverage that allow me to go 10 times faster than I ever could before.

The number of AI tools in my stack right now probably surpasses twenty.

Getting to this point was the result of many hours and months of tinkering, toying, and fine-tuning how these tools might fit into my work.

I won't go into my entire tool stack this week (stay tuned for next week!) in the essence of time.

But if you're someone who wants to get more embedded with these tools, all it takes is having ChatGPT (or Claude, because it’s wildly underrated) open in your browser side by side with whatever you're doing at all times and engaging with it, cross-checking your thinking and bouncing your ideas off it.

Without feeling bad, without feeling like you’re selling out to the AI and without feeling like you’re cheating.

Because you’re not, you’re just getting ahead.

AI won’t take your job

…someone using AI will.

Only people who listen to the news too much and get caught up in hysteria will believe that a super intelligence is going to arrive tomorrow and take all of our jobs.

I’ve adopted more of an Altman-esque mindset—skewing toward the moderate outcome.

What precipitates this moderate outcome is progress that is slower than the AI doomers believe will happen, but faster than what the naysayers think.

Progress where a sentient superintelligence doesn't turn on Skynet tomorrow, but progress where AI literally becomes more capable than a human in a low-level data entry job in the next 5 years—doing it way faster and way more effectively than a human ever could.

That's why I'm becoming a bigger believer in the saying that AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will.

To fight against someone with AI taking your job, the only rational conclusion is to start using AI.

But not just using it because you feel like you have to or to fill up your CV. Using AI with the goal of replacing the human in the loop—with no restraint and no insecurity.

This requires a complete shift in your mindset and outlook.

Changing your mindset in this way is not relinquishing your critical thinking to Claude.

You’re just using AI as an accelerant to your critical thinking, allowing you to move ten times faster than any other human in your field.

That is the AI Operating System for the mind.

Next week, we’ll get into the tools.

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Thanks for reading today’s deep dive.

I’ll be back in your inbox on Sunday.

— Luca