I Recreated Management With AI: 9 Things I Do Differently

🦄 Thanks @francistrdev for starting the conversation that really got me to thinking about this idea in the first place. I started truly working with AI shortly before I started writing these posts a little over a year ago. My thesis was simple at the time: prove that AI was far more capable a tool than what I had seen anyone using it for so far. My proof was strictly gut instinct and I spent a lot of time fighting with Copilot to prove I was right. Not all of those experiments went according to plan exactly, but I'm still convinced I'm right. That particular ADHD spiral has came and went, and most of it is ingrained as habit. I don't use Spec Kit because by the time it showed up I already had my own version running. I also need to get back to sharing what really works for me. So here we are again. Back to writing (with AI) and the proof to back it all up. One thing up front, because somebody is going to ask: everything here is personal projects and my portfolio . There's no critical prod system anywhere in this post, and if there were, a few of these answers would shift. Not all of them — I'd still let AI run a lot further off-leash than most of my enterprise counterparts would. 🐒 The Org Chart Has One Employee 🪧 I don't just use AI as a tool. I design it as a living system, and I grow the tech as the tech grows. I ran one prompt across Codex, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cowork, and Gemini, all separately, and asked every one of them what was actually different about the way I work. Five different systems, each one with its own long history of putting up with me, and not one of them could see what the others said. One came back with this: I use AI to write code, review the AI-written code, review the review against the live branch, test the corrections, and then record whatever went wrong as a rule for the next AI. Apparently I recreated management. Most of the private exchanges quoted in this post came out of that same pile, whether they were my own prompts, my memory fi