AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating

Summary

AI's real superpower: consuming, not creatingOctober 30, 2025Everyone's using AI wrong. Including me, until last month. We ask AI to write emails, generate reports, create content. But that's like using a supercomputer as a typewriter. The real breakthrough happened when I flipped my entire approach. AI's superpower isn't creation. It's consumption. The creation trap Here's how most people use AI: "Write a blog post about engineering leadership" "Generate code for this feature" "Create a summary of this meeting" Makes sense. These tasks save time. But they're thinking too small. My Obsidian vault contains: → 3 years of daily engineering notes → 500+ meeting reflections → Thousands of fleeting observations about building software → Every book highlight and conference insight I've captured No human could read all of this in a lifetime. AI consumes it in seconds. The consumption breakthrough Last month I connected my Obsidian vault to AI. The questions changed completely: Instead of "Write me something new" I ask "What have I already discovered?" Real examples from this week: "What patterns emerge from my last 50 one-on-ones?" AI found that performance issues always preceded tool complaints by 2-3 weeks. I'd never connected those dots. "How has my thinking about technical debt evolved?" Turns out I went from seeing it as "things to fix" to "information about system evolution" around March 2023. Forgotten paradigm shift. "Find connections between Buffer's API design and my carpeta.app architecture" Surfaced 12 design decisions I'm unconsciously repeating. Some good. Some I need to rethink. Your knowledge compounds, but only if accessible Every meeting, every shower thought, every debugging session teaches you something. But that knowledge is worthless if you can't retrieve it. Traditional search fails because you need to remember exact words. Your brain fails because it wasn't designed to store everything. AI changes the retrieval game: → Query by concept, not keywords ...