How to Use AI to Live a More Inspired Life: An Older Tradie's Honest Guide

I'm Chippo, an older tradie in the Yarra Valley. I spent thirty-five years on the tools, a fair chunk of my life in recording studios, and more hours than I'll admit chasing Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar tone. My joints are tired and shagged, and they're sending me the bill for all of it.

I am not a tech person. I didn't grow up with computers, I don't speak in acronyms, and the first time someone said "large language model" to me I assumed it was a type of scaffolding.

But over the last while I've built myself an AI assistant. It runs on a little computer at home, it keeps all my notes, and I talk to it from my phone. It's changed how I live more than any tool I've bought in years. Some days it's brilliant. Some days I want to throw it in the dam.

This is my honest guide to how to use AI when you're not a tech person. It's not about writing essays or making pictures of cats in space. It's about using AI to make an ordinary life a bit more interesting, a bit less of a grind, and a lot more your own.

What "using AI" actually means for a bloke like me

Forget the hype for a minute. For me, AI is three things:

• Someone to think out loud with. I talk, it listens, it asks the question I didn't think of.
• A researcher who works for cents. It'll dig up things in two minutes that would have taken me a wet weekend.
• An offsider for the jobs I hate. Paperwork, lists, reminders, writing things up.

It's a power tool. It isn't magic and it isn't the enemy. Like any power tool, it's useful in the right hands and dangerous in the wrong ones, and you need to know which way it kicks.

Five ways I actually use AI

1. It picks my weekend adventures

This is my favourite. I built a little AI trip planner I call Mr Adventure. The idea is that every Wednesday it looks around my local area, finds three places I've never been, and sends them to my phone with a map pin and a bit of history about each one. I pick one, and on Saturday I go and have a look.

It's still learning my area, and it's taught me a lot already. AI will happily make up history if you let it, so everything gets checked. But it has got me off the couch and into places I'd driven past for decades. The trips end up in Adventures.

2. It tells me when I'm about to waste months

I had what I thought was a genius idea: talk into your phone while walking around a job, and have AI turn it into a proper quote. I was ready to build it.

Before I did, I asked AI to go and look. Within minutes it had found at least eight apps already doing exactly that, plus one of the big job-management programs that had just added it. Months of my life saved by one honest question. That story, and how those apps actually stack up, is in Tradie Tech.

The lesson: before you start anything, ask AI "who's already doing this?" It's the cheapest reality check you'll ever get.

3. It does research for the price of a pie

When I started this blog, I wanted to know what people actually search for. I got AI to pull the real numbers on everything I'm interested in, from bushwalks to blues guitar to tradie software. Over two hundred searches checked, and it cost me twenty-seven cents.

Some of it was a slap in the face. Hardly anyone searches for the things I thought were my best ideas. Some of it was a lovely surprise: the places in my own backyard get searched tens of thousands of times a month. You can't argue with numbers, and now I don't have to guess.

4. I write without typing

I'd rather swing a hammer all day than type a page. So I don't. I talk into a voice memo, the way I'd tell a mate about something. The AI turns that into a draft, then I listen back to it and say "yep", "nah", or "that's not how I'd say it".

Here's the honest reason. I'm dyslexic. Reading and typing have always been hard work for me, so I listen to nearly everything through a text-to-speech program. Talking and listening is how my brain works best, and AI is the first thing that's let me write that way.

This post started that way. The words are mine. The AI just stopped them getting stuck between my head and the keyboard.

5. It keeps my life in one place

Notes, to-do lists, reminders, half-baked ideas at two in the morning. They all go to the assistant, and it files them where they belong. When I come back to something weeks later, it can tell me where I was up to. For someone with too many interests and not enough memory, that alone is worth it.

What AI is rubbish at

If I'm going to tell you what it's good for, I owe you the other side.

• It makes things up. Especially history, names and dates. It says them with total confidence. Always check anything that matters.
• It agrees with you too easily. Ask it whether your idea is good and it'll often say yes. Ask it "what's wrong with this?" instead and you'll get far more out of it.
• It doesn't know what things cost in the real world. It can format a quote beautifully. It has no idea that the back of that house is on a slope and the access is a nightmare. That knowledge is still in your head.
• It can't do the doing. It can plan the walk. You still have to walk it.
• It's only as private as you make it. Think about who's on the other end of what you type. I don't put anything into AI that I wouldn't want read out at the pub.

How to start using AI if you're not a tech person

You don't need to build what I built. Start small.

1. Pick one job you hate. A letter you've been putting off, a quote, a list, a plan for the weekend.
2. Talk to it like a mate. Open ChatGPT or Claude (both have free versions), and just explain the job in plain words, the way you'd explain it to an apprentice. You don't need special magic phrases.
3. Argue with it. If the answer's not right, tell it why. "Nah, too formal, I'm a carpenter not a lawyer." It'll fix it.
4. Check anything that matters. Facts, prices, dates, anything legal or medical.
5. Keep what works, ditch the rest. After a month you'll know which jobs it's good for in your life. Those are the ones to keep.

That's it. Everything I've built grew out of doing those five things, one annoying job at a time.

Why I called this Peak Inspire

"Peak" as in the top of being inspired, the days when life feels like it's actually going somewhere. And "peak" as in the mountains, because a lot of what this AI does is get me out the door and up a hill.

I'm at the age where it'd be easy to decide the interesting part of life is behind me. I don't buy it. This blog is me finding out what happens when an older tradie points AI at real life: the trips it picks, the tools that earn their keep, and the ones that don't.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, have a look around AI Life, see where Mr Adventure sends me in Adventures, or check out the tradie software I'm testing in Tradie Tech.