Interact with AI agents on a meta-level by using specific keywords that act as commands to their underlying structure. Phrases like "that's a decision" or "update your soul file" are direct instructions for the agent to log information in a specific way or alter its core persona. This is a more advanced form of prompt engineering.
Treat new AI agents not as tools, but as new hires. Provide them with their own email addresses and password vaults, and grant access incrementally. This mirrors a standard employee onboarding process, enhancing security and allowing you to build trust based on performance before granting access to sensitive systems.
AI agents fundamentally change one's relationship with time and ambition, especially for those with demanding schedules like parents. By offloading tasks and working asynchronously, agents allow individuals to pursue complex projects in small pockets of available time, like late at night. This restores the capacity for ambition that might otherwise be deferred.
While messaging platforms like Slack can serve as an interface for human-to-agent communication, they are fundamentally ill-suited for agent-to-agent collaboration. These tools are designed for human interaction patterns, creating friction when orchestrating multiple autonomous agents and indicating a need for new, agent-native communication protocols.
Instead of one generalist AI assistant, create multiple specialized agents, each with a unique persona (e.g., a creative teacher) defined in a "soul" file. Partition their access to specific data "vaults" (like separate Obsidian folders). This specialization improves output quality and maintains logical, secure boundaries between different life domains.
For maximum security, run different AI agents on separate physical machines (like Mac Minis). This creates a hard barrier, preventing an agent with access to sensitive data (e.g., finances) from interacting with an agent that has external communication channels (e.g., scheduling via iMessage), minimizing the risk of accidental data leaks.
Building a "second brain" often fails due to tedious manual data entry. Bypass this by using an AI agent's multimodal capabilities. Simply take photos of activities or book pages. The agent can then parse these images and automatically log the relevant information into a structured format (e.g., a homeschool lesson log in Obsidian), eliminating friction.
Overcome an AI agent's inability to interact with the physical world by creating a digital representation of it. By taking photos of household items like educational toys or books, the AI can automatically create a detailed inventory, understand what you own, and recommend using these physical items in relevant contexts, like pulling out a specific toy for a lesson plan.
Even without technical skills, you can develop custom applications by treating your AI coding agent as a dedicated developer. Frame the project with a strong sense of mission and purpose. Persistently push back when the agent says something is impossible. This approach transforms the interaction from a simple command-and-response to a collaborative, goal-oriented development process.