I arrived at three badly neglected houses with no running water, a broken used car, a pile of tools, and only a partial idea what I was doing.
Even the backstory is pretty intriguing, but we can get to that in time. For now, let’s begin with my arrival at these houses, each of them in need of serious work.
Having had a run of bad luck in 2025, I made an arrangement with the owner of these homes that I would fix them up at a bargain price if I could live in one of them during the work. She agreed to this. I moved in. The work began. The pay began.
Fair to say the homeowner can be kind of eccentric. She could charitably be described as unreliable. I haven’t actually had a conversation with her in weeks, but I’m keeping up my end of the deal as long as I live here.
As for me, I have tools and talent, but these houses, and a used car I purchased off Craigslist, require much more work than I am actually qualified to do.
I began the year with a broken car, three houses with no running water, pest problems, yards reclaimed by nature, and not the first clue what to do about much of it. I sat here sulking for some time about what had become of my life.
I paced and swore and thought and stared at my phone trying to come up with some kind of solution to this vast array of problems.
My most immediate challenge was the plumbing. My girlfriend and I were driving to Walmart every day to refill water bottles at $0.54/gallon, and that really adds up when you like to shower daily and avoid a slow, painful death from dehydration.
I called a plumber. He suggested I call a well drilling company to do a diagnostic on my well. He said my jet pump had been running dry for years and was surely ruined as a consequence. We shut the breaker off to save electricity.
I decided to ask Lumo for advice. He’s an AI large language model from the makers of Proton Mail, whose email, VPN, and cloud storage services I’ve trusted for many years.
Lumo gave me step-by-step instructions to prime the well pump and start it again. The pump worked just fine, it turned out, as I discovered when water started spraying from the boiler, broken pipes in the crawlspace, and baseboard heaters upstairs.
Thus began my journey of having AI help me solve one problem, only to discover another, and then having the AI help me solve that problem, in what seems like perpetuity.
Lumo is a pretty smart cat — his logo is a feline character — but he doesn’t see too good. I tried to send him pictures I took so he could analyze mechanical and plumbing problems, but he actually turned out to lack this feature.
Thus began my AI Council.
At first, Anthropic’s Claude was just Lumo’s seeing-eye dog. I’d have Claude describe the image, I’d copy and paste that description to Lumo, and we would work out what to do.
But Claude is a pretty smart guy himself, and all that copypasta started to seem kind of pointless when Claude was capable of assessing the situation on his own. This became especially vital as I found out that the used car I purchased had a lot of problems the seller did not disclose. I got a quote from a name-brand auto repair shop that said fixing the car would cost nearly twice its value.
I got the impression I was being taken for a ride by these guys. Not all of those repairs were actually necessary, and for those that were, the parts actually weren’t that expensive.
If AI can help me be a plumber, could it help me be an auto mechanic?
As you’ll get to know while you traverse this journey with me, the answer to that question isn’t a simple one.
Responsible AI models warn the user they are capable of making mistakes. When approached with complex problems, they do this with some frequency.
After Claude made some errors helping me out with my car, I decided to try ChatGPT. We almost destroyed my transmission by applying ever-increasing force to a seal that was not coming out, culminating in my car attached to a come-along and a slide hammer flying across my yard with enough force to take your head off.
Trying to remove an oil seal with a come-along.
Trying to remove an oil seal with a come-along.
In this way I learned that while AI could provide useful information, it was vitally important that I not just ask for the next step and do whatever it told me. The only way this could possibly work was for me to understand why I was being given the instructions, and to make sure the instructions were correct.
I also began using one AI model to check the assumptions of another. I discovered that each system had its own strengths and weaknesses. Some excelled in mechanical reasoning. Some at navigating bureaucracy. Some at identifying plants and insects. They had different ways of handling uncertainty, different ways of establishing priorities, and different tolerances for error and risk.
Letting AI do your thinking for you leads to a world of dystopian fiction.
2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Matrix.
Terminator.
But you don’t need to go full Sarah Connor to keep the chaos at bay.
Computers were designed to make our lives easier. When we try to have them make our lives effortless, they do quite the opposite.
The computer cannot think for you, but it can help you think.
This is the story of a man met with challenges he could not hope to solve on his own. Determined to solve them anyway, he sought help from highly capable but error-prone artificial intelligence systems. The results have been an informative mix of failure and success, laughter and inspiration, danger and triumph, trial and error.
Join me on this journey, and I promise you more than entertainment. You may learn useful skills. You may laugh at mistakes before realizing there is something true beneath the joke. You may enjoy the most satisfying sort of laughter: the sort that comes with pondering the truth beneath the jest.
I’m just a guy trying to keep the chaos at bay, with a little help from my friends.
Care to be one?
Your support helps to buy the tools and materials I need to do the work you're seeing take place. It (hopefully) allows me to devote all of my time and attention to this project instead of seeking income in ways that don't inform or entertain you.
