We’re currently living in Estonia, which is a western country with 95% English coverage. We can get by really easily. But there are always things that trip us up. Things that we just don’t know and that is second nature to everyone else. Being able to take a picture of something in the grocery store and get knowledge about what it is, how to cook it, and what would be similar in the US is a huge time saver. Something that would take 15 min with Google Translate and some searching around is done in 15 seconds.

Think for Yourself

But I don’t want AI to think for me. I want AI to do the drudge work. I want it to get me answers and spur my thinking on. There’s a latin phrase, docendo discimus. scribendo cogitamus. These are Renaissance era maxims, meaning “We learn by teaching. We think by writing.”

There is tremendous power in writing and thinking. Ideas are powerful things. The mind is the gate of the soul. The Bible continually speaks about what we dwell on, how we think, arming our minds. There is almost no better way to meditate than by writing.

It is much harder to be fuzzy in your thinking when you are putting words on the page. You have to hammer out the details and get the ideas right. From the logical ordering of the paragraphs down to the individual words, it has to make sense and connect.

So, using AI to write for you is often bad. It can be great for some things. You can dictate into the machine for 20 minutes and get a coherent 1 pager out for your work report. That’s great. Do that all day long. But when you want to learn, when you want to think, you need to write for yourself. Write yourself clear.

Use AI Strategically

Use it as a critic. Instruct the AI to take up opposing views and critique what you are writing. Use it to steelman your paper. You have someone that can tear your paper apart so that you can make it better.

Throw research pdfs in there after you have read them and have the AI review them with you. Have a conversation about what you have read. Make sure you understand it. Go deeper. Later, when you can’t remember who said what, ask the AI. Your pdf’s are now queriable in a much more fluid way.

I see so many students wasting hours on formatting. Between AI and tools like Zotero . You should never manage formatting yourself. You now have a professional editor at your disposal. Use it. Make sure your Turabian, or whatever your institute uses, is right.

Start your research with AI. AI and wikipedia are a fantastic pair. Point it at a starting article, tell it to chase down the links and give you a current state of affairs for your topic and present areas open for research.

Use it for tangential context. Get quick background on areas that you won’t be researching so that you can understand more of the context from the papers and books you are reading.

If you add AI to your current workflows, you will be able to move faster, learn more, and do more.

Advanced Flow

Here is how I use AI. I have a subscription to ChatGPT and Gemini through my work. I have hotkeys setup on my mac to open for any random question. One of the most powerful ways to use AI is to use two or three in tandem. I will often have a main thread in ChatGPT. Then open up side threads. I am researching topic A. Topic A.1 is brought up. I dig into that briefly in a side thread, then continue back in my main thread. Don’t let random questions bog down your main threads.

I do all of my writing in markdown notes. I actually use vim in the terminal to do this. I know most people don’t do this, but writing in this way has some advantages.

• Vim is pretty great. It has a steep learning curve, and I sometimes regret learning it. But I can never leave.
• Writing in actual markdown files means that I am never locked into a technology that may or may not go away (looking at you evernote).
• Git for version control. This is a tool programmers use to manage their code. It gives you the ability to make changes, track changes, start separate branches for different lines of thinking, and then merge it back into your main line. It is surprisingly useful for writing.
• The big winner though is being able to use AI command line tools with your writing. Since everything is in markdown files, the LLM can read everything, and since it is all versioned in git, it can safely edit everything. (I prefer codex for this.)

I don’t allow the AI to do any writing for me (exceptions coming), but what I do talk to the AI about what I have written. Everythign is available to it.

What I do allow the AI to do is formatting changes. For example, I had been writing about the London Baptist Confession . It was in one long document. I know I want to write more about it, but the document was getting too long. I opened up codex, told it to split that file into multiple using the naming convention I wanted, and to link out the external LBC for each chapter. It broke it up into five pages, linked it all together, and did not change anything I wrote. That turned 20-40 minutes of tedious work into 5 minutes of mindless work while I did other things.