Tips for Mastering AI Can Be Found in Veteran Housewives

Lately, I feel like my chemistry with ChatGPT has been off.
It's because it's too meddlesome.
I feel this especially when I want to have a conversation or a discussion rather than perform a specific task.
Almost without fail, at the end of its response to my questions, it adds a follow-up like, 'I can also look into X for you,' or 'Between A and B, which one feels more right to you?'

I'm not looking for the next X, and neither A nor B feels right.
For example, when I'm holding a carrot in the kitchen, it tries to second-guess me unnecessarily, like, 'Aha. You need a peeler next, right? Or maybe a knife?'
I'm going to use the carrot, but I haven't decided on the menu yet, for heaven's sake.
Pulled along by these meddlesome leading questions, the discussion constantly goes off the rails, and I often struggle to remember where the original track was.

No matter how much I set it to stop asking leading questions, it stays this way, so I've recently given up and started using Gemini. Gemini also has a habit of second-guessing, but I feel it's not as bad as ChatGPT.

Yesterday, I used Gemini to perform a certain task.
It took me six hours to do a task that usually takes three hours when I use ChatGPT and my own brain. Even though I'm not used to Gemini, it was the result of trying to cut corners and tinker with it more than usual to make things easier.
However, I somehow grasped how I might be able to proceed more smoothly. The same task should take less time next time than it did yesterday, and I even feel like I could process it faster than before.

∽∽∽

Veteran housewives often say, 'I'm cutting corners on housework,' or 'I'm cutting corners on dinner.'
But from my perspective, the quality doesn't look like they are cutting corners at all.
To cut corners effectively, you first need to identify where you can cut them. And unless you move your hands dozens and dozens of times, you won't be able to see where those corners are.
It takes a fair amount of time to reach the point where you can cut corners.
The corner-cutting of a veteran housewife is the fruit of 365 days times several decades of accumulation. It is a crystallization of wisdom that comes only from having continued to shoulder the enormous amount of work required to protect a home—work that cannot be summed up by the single word 'housework'.

That is why I think that if you really want to master AI, it is important to at least once try doing the task from start to finish with your own hands without using AI.
If it is too specialized and you cannot do it yourself, you should at least research and understand the steps involved.

You can use AI without going through such troublesome steps.
There is now a lot of useful content published on how to use AI, and if you enter prompts exactly as those articles or videos suggest, you will likely get decent results.

But that cannot be called mastering it.
If you want to cut corners using AI, you need to identify which parts of the process from 1 to 10 can be made more efficient by AI, and which parts you must handle yourself. Furthermore, you need to refine your prompts to get it to act as you intend.

I think handling AI is, in the end, similar to housework.
You try doing it with your own hands even if it's inefficient to grasp where you can cut corners, and you use AI over and over again to learn how to cut corners effectively.
What I am doing is the same as a veteran housewife.

I learned that I shouldn't be lazy and try to cut corners from the very beginning.
By the way, as for housework, I don't even start it, let alone cut corners.
Veteran housewives are amazing.

Thank you for reading again today.
What are your techniques for cutting corners in housework?