(2026-06-22) Romero How To Use AI To Make You Better At The Right Things

Alberto Romero: How to Use AI to Make You Better at the Right Things. I have ~700 half-written essays in my drafts folder... I used to think of my drafts folder as a sacred place where I guarded cash-making thoughts. Now I see it for what it is: a cemetery.

Most of what you could do will simply not happen because your grasp is short. That’s no problem, though, because a short grasp keeps your aspirations intact. As Robert Browning wrote: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Blogger Venkatesh Rao took Browning’s idea and transposed it into AI. To him, AI is how you close the gap between your short grasp and your long reach. It might kill your ambition but only by manifesting it into action. With AI, Rao has a hold on his own personal heaven:
"Routinely reaching well beyond my native creative aptitudes is a heady feeling"" ((2025-12-19) Rao Revenge Of The Dilettantes)

But we can go further than Rao. By virtue of its versatility and its predisposition to enhance any of your abandoned passions, AI can extend your grasp well beyond your reach. We’re no longer in Browning’s heaven but past it. Your ambition is now overshadowed by your actual options. AI doesn’t fix dilettantism but extends a lifeline

The corollary to this opportunity is that there’s no excuse not to visit that cemetery. It’s lazy to allow a machine to do your work for you, but it’s not lazy to reduce the initial friction.

AI allows you to be both a specialist and a generalist at once and that can be as good a gift as heaven.

In practice, however, AI has important flaws that caveat its grasp-lengthening nature: it’s not that you should avoid using it for your core work but that you can’t. Terence Tao, one of the world’s best mathematicians, explains it best in his latest appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast. He shared an insight that radically changed my mentality on how to use AI:
I’m definitely noticing that the style in which I do mathematics is changing quite a bit, and the type of things I do. For example, my papers now have a lot more code, a lot more pictures

The core of what I do, actually solving the most difficult part of a math problem, hasn’t changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that

It’s made the papers richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

He’s more productive at things he would otherwise simply not do. Tao is now a man whose grasp extends to things his reach never bothered to include.

Back in my cemetery, I can do the same thing: “Hey Claude, look at this pile of slop in my drafts folder and find me something worth developing further. I want a topic that’s timely (search the news) and timeless (read Homer) at the same time. Suggest three titles, three angles, and an outline for each.”

Notice that I never said that AI’s inability to help Tao is related to the difficulty of his work. The reason is, instead, about what “core work” means, for both Tao and you. Core work is, by definition, the part that requires your specific judgment, taste, and accumulated knowledge, and other things. In short, your circumstance.

All knowledge workers have a core work that AI just can’t touch; no amount of context is enough to nail every detail. AI is intrinsically auxiliary because it can’t get inside your brain; it improves your performance but it hardly improves your competence

Here’s a secret. Knowledge work has an invisible protective layer against AI: all of it—every level of complexity, every profession, every skill tier—is inherently relational because, at the very least, it is in relationship with you.

If you try to push AI down the Mariana trench of your skill and knowledge, you’re failing hard at the question of “where can AI help you the most?” Once you’re good at something, it just won’t help you there over the long run. It can do amazing things but for you to improve, you need to understand them yourself. There are no shortcuts to being better. And yet, all the adjacent things you wanted to do but didn’t have time or energy for are now low-hanging fruit.

To finish, let me give you some quick tips that I use in my own practice to apply these ideas in a way that’s coherent with the framework. (paywall)