Reminder: You can just do things with LLMs - no permission needed
A long-list of things that you can do with LLMs, to get the year started
Let’s get the new year started with a reminder: You can just do things with AI assistants. No permission needed to be creative, learn something new, or tackle a complex problem that's been weighing on you. You can just start.
LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or DeepSeek dramatically expand what's possible in the knowledge space. While they aren't perfect, these tools let you do things that would traditionally require significant financial investment, or considerable investment of your time and energy.
This collection of practical ideas draws inspiration from a brilliant post from Milan Cvitkovic that fundamentally shifted my perspective back in 2020. Recently, Anne-Laure Le Cunff explored a similar theme on X. I'll keep updating this list, both for my benefit and yours - as it's surprisingly easy to forget just how much we can accomplish with these tools.
Solve hard problems
If you are stuck on ANY topic, you can describe your problem to the LLM and ask it for an approach to solve it. Of course, you can also ask for solutions, but it’s often more fun and more valuable to develop the solutions yourself.
You should certainly solve problems if they have been bothering you for a while. There is no reason in this era of AI assistance to remain stuck or returning to the same problem over and over. Rather than enduring difficult meetings or challenging work periods, engage with your LLM to work through whatever's on your mind.
Make better decisions
This is very similar to solving hard problems. You can ask your LLM to support any decision making process, whether for a work topic or where to go on holidays. Describe your situation - and jointly with your LLM, define good decision making criteria that apply. Systematically evaluate each criterion, then step back for a holistic assessment. Alternatively, document multiple options and use the LLM to explore pros and cons before making your choice.
Conduct thoughts experiments
Not ready yet to make a decision? Work with your LLM to explore scenarios together. If you've been mulling over an important work or life matter, describe the situation and potential scenarios you've considered. What happens if you take different paths? Ask the LLM to suggest additional scenarios and help sketch out possible outcomes. This exploration can help clarify what you find appealing, concerning, or irrelevant, leading to more informed decisions.
Sharpen your thinking
For important topics, write down what it is you are thinking. What are the core beliefs you hold? What are the key constraints and opportunities? What do you know, what do you not yet know? Also: How do you feel about a situation?
Often we think our thinking is sharp - but it’s far from it. Writing down our ideas helps us be much more nuanced and precise around what it is we are thinking exactly. This may take some time and a lot of energy, and we may get bored. But it’s really valuable, even without LLMs.
Then leverage your LLM as a thought partner to challenge your thinking. Are your assumptions right and helpful? Are there logical inconsistencies? What perspectives might you be missing? Are you overthinking or letting emotions cloud your judgment? Use this feedback to refine your thinking.
Also, you can also collaborate with your LLM on probability assessments - how likely will different scenarios come to play out? How realistic is a worst case or best case situation that has been on your mind? Describe the scenarios and potential influencing factors. Include your expectations and stakeholder behaviors. Work together with the LLM to estimate likelihoods. There is no need for precise percentages, often a simple "likely" versus "unlikely" suffices. Use these probability insights to update your thinking or take action.
Learn something new
You can learn about a topic that has been on your mind - even if you are not a student or super brainy. Use LLMs to summarize books, explain complex concepts, or break down academic research into more digestible insights. There is probably dozens if not hundreds of questions on our minds where we would benefit from learning how things work. We are affected by so many factors - economics, finance, politics, taxes - that we don’t understand clearly. It’s really helpful to understand and make up your mind about these matters.
Academic journals offer lots of research on nearly every major economic, sociological, political, or financial topic. Don't let the overly complex academic language intimidate you - your LLM can translate it, highlight key findings, and connect new concepts to your existing knowledge. Many articles are freely available online, and you can always ask your LLM clarifying questions to better understand relevance.
LLMs can also help you extract value from podcasts and YouTube content - and save lots of your time. Get the transcript for the LLM to review, ask it for an overall summary, then ask deeper questions. If you want, you can of course still listen to or watch the whole thing, but now with better context and understanding.
Think of your LLM as a research assistant. Share your interests and let it suggest new areas to explore. While you might prefer doing initial research yourself, the LLM can also handle this aspect.
Getting answers
While Google provides answers to most factual questions, its results can be biased by commercial interests - especially for topics like sports, health or food safety. Consider using Perplexity.ai as an alternative. Of course, always verify answers and sources independently.
Coaching
LLMs make excellent life coaches. Share challenging situations or decisions, whether personal or professional. Provide context, concerns, initial thoughts, and input from others. Engage in a dialogue with your LLM, using it more as a guide than a solution provider. Ask it to summarize its understanding - or ask clarifying questions to better understand what is going on. Ask for an approach to help you tackle your challenging situations - not solutions.
Taking notes
Develop a robust knowledge management system. LLMs can help summarize articles, structure notes, and integrate new ideas into your existing knowledge base. Taking notes incurs zero actual costs, as there are fully sufficient notes apps on your mobile or computer already, for free. If you are more serious about knowledge management, you can try Notion or Obsidian to collect ideas.
Document concepts or mental models that you find interesting, e.g., first principles thinking, circle of concern vs. circle of influence, value propositions. For more material topics, think about building wikis or entire knowledge libraries. This is especially useful for a topic that you will come back to often, e.g., a research topic for ongoing side projects or complex work matters. Creating your own wiki will already work wonders to help you better understand the subject matter. Feed your wiki to your LLM to refine and expand it - and get better guidance from it.
Write SOPs
Create manuals or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for your key knowledge management tasks - whether for work, side projects, or personal development. Think of SOPs as notes that describe good processes, rather than content-focused notes. Documenting helps clarify your thinking and challenges your existing approaches.
Share your SOP with your LLM to collaboratively work through tasks using your preferred approach. Start with a basic structure - define goals, approach, steps, and rationale. Then partner with your LLM to flesh out details and refine procedures.
As always, I'm interested in your thoughts: Feel free to message me. Or, if you prefer, you can share your feedback anonymously via this form.
All opinions are my own. Please be mindful of your company's rules for AI tools and use good judgment when dealing with sensitive data.