When not to use AI! - Opinion

When Consistency Matters, Don' t use AI!

Wait - I thought you were focusing on becoming an AI expert? I am and I'm telling you that there are simply times AI is overkill and quite frankly not the most efficient way to go.

Differences when doing the same repetitive task.

Imagine you have an employee that doesn't remember anything from one task to another. This employee is helping you with paperwork and you want to have a consistent brand and form. You want your invoices to look the same. If you used AI with an LLM prompt the results won't look the same each time. That will lead to confusion and it WILL slow you down.

Instead use AI to generate a standard form. Then use AI to create a program (or buy one off the shelf that will consistently add things up the same and do the tasks the same each time.

Some of you will say, "You can feed AI a template that it will use consistently fill in and get a consistent result" and yes 99 out of 100 times it will be consitent but it's not guaranteed and instead of using your local compute freely, you will need to pay for that AI use.

Financially more expensive.

Other reasons not to use AI, each time you run through that task that is EXACTLY the same each time, you will spend money for AI to process it. Instead use batch jobs to process that task for you. If I just need to run a report, most Business Software written since the 90s has some way to send you an updated report on a daily basis.

Putting an AI in the loop for simple reporting tasks is a bit like using an expensive Rube Goldberg machine. For those who haven't heard of a Rube Goldberg machine, it is a deliberately over complicated contraption that performs a simple task through a long chain reaction of steps — like a marble rolling down a ramp to tip a lever, which swings a hammer, which pops a balloon, which drops a weight... all just to flip a light switch. It's named after cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who drew absurd invention diagrams in the early 1900s. The humor and appeal come from the ridiculous inefficiency: maximum effort and complexity for minimum result. Picture Below -

When AI and Batch Jobs are better together.

What I will suggest is where you can enhance an otherwise standard process, use AI within that process.

For instance, a number of my Blogs are AI assisted. WAIT - You're cheating? Well you can think of it that way, but more often than not, I need to do research to even begin writing an article. For example:

What happened this week?

Or how do those CVEs effect us in the real world?

Both tasks we have all been using Google for sine the early 2000's. So instead of spending hours in front of the keyboard, I used an AI Blog Bot.

Claude and I generated the Blog Bot python script to generate an article, posts the blog to my Wix account where you might be reading this article now but leaves it unpublished. It even uses Pexel to grab a relevant picture for me. The bot uses references that I include in each article, so I can check it and you can read any original content you might have more questions about.

I run on a cron job daily at 5am to generate a couple of articles, then when time allows, I read the articles, tweak them or just delete them if they aren't very good or I've already published an article based on that information in the past.

So, I'm using both local compute with a consistent format and using AI for some some of the grunt work.

If you're curious, I did not use AI to generate this one. The only paragraph I used AI was for the reference to a Rube Goldberg machine.