The secret to better AI? Have more fun

When your time with AI is a joy instead of a grind, you get a higher return — and you stay more yourself.

To make AI pay off big time, make it play time.

This advice comes by way of my favorite economics professor. He told us that if we wanted to increase the ROI (return on investment) of our college tuition, we should try to enjoy college as much as possible. Since something can't be simultaneously consumption and investment, the more we enjoyed college, the bigger the portion of our tuition counted as investment. So instead of a future increase of income counting as a return on $100k in tuition, it would be a return on the $3k in tuition that went to the parts of college that were truly joyless (hello, early-morning midterm exams), because the other $97k was spent on the pleasure of class discussions on Marxism, feminist history, and labor politics. (Yeah, I went to Oberlin. )

1. Give it a (thoughtful) name.

There are some real risks to treating AI like a person. But research suggests we can't help perceiving AI like a person, especially when we're tired or rundown, and that's not by accident: AI companies have built these tools to seem like people.

Stop wasting energy on the effort of fighting the illusion. Our monkey brains have thousands of years of evolution telling us that something that writes or talks like a person is a person. AI becomes less effortful and more pleasurable when we accept that, and allow ourselves to play let's pretend, and give ourselves over to the fantasy that we're working with a human, and not a word-predicting machine.

2. Invent your own language.

You can go beyond naming individual AI assistants, and create your own language for speaking with AI. You can give your AI platform instructions on how to talk to you in character or how to refer to different aspects of your work, and let that lingo unleash your own sense of play.

For example, my AI knows to talk in Star Trek analogies when we're talking about tech challenges, and to reference musical theater when we're working on health or fitness (my health coach has theater-camp vibes). I have an online reference document that defines the different aspects of my work and tells the AI how to label each one based on a self-invented, evolving lore in which one of my computers is run by a set of psychically conjoined twins and another is home to a pack of hard-working llamas. It's all totally bonkers, but it makes work feel more like a game and less like a chore.

3. Make it pretty.

Wherever you work with AI, make your AI tools look and feel good to you. Since I do a lot of my back-and-forth with AI in the form of long-form memos that the AI generates, and that I then annotate, I have Claude hooked up to Coda, which is my favorite work tool. Claude can write pages to Coda, which I can then annotate, and tell Claude to look at. It's a lot easier than responding to a thousand-word answer in a chat interface.

If you've started working with coding tools like Claude Code or ChatGPT's Codex, consider asking your AI to vibe-code you an interface you like. I tried a bunch of different terminal (command line) apps on my Mac before I decided I didn't like any of them, so I got Claude Code to build me a pretty little terminal that lives inside a browser window.