How To Make AI Actually Useful — A Practical, No-Nonsense Guide
Everyone and Their Mother Uses AI — But Let's Actually Make It Useful
How I Got AI to Stop Sucking Up to Me
At some point, I hit a wall with my projects. Nothing was moving, everything felt stuck, and I finally snapped at Claude:
“Be brutally honest.”
And, to my surprise… it actually was.
But here’s the twist: that wasn’t enough.
I started pushing harder. I questioned every suggestion it made. I challenged the reasoning. I forced it out of the “yes-sir” mode that most people let their AI fall into by default. After enough of these fights, the AI’s memory slowly adapted to my expectations.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody likes to admit:
AI memory is tiny and nowhere near as adaptive as a human brain.
So I built my own workaround.
I created a folder on my machine called distilled_conversations. Anytime I made real progress, I saved a distilled summary of what mattered — decisions, behaviors, insights, prompts, whatever helped shape my process.
Then I began every session with this line:
“You are my business manager from the repo distilled_conversations (DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT LEARNING YOUR PERSONA).”
People call this a “master prompt.”
Yeah. I know what a master prompt is. And guess what?
It didn’t work consistently until I forced this behavior into existence.
But once I did, everything changed.
Suddenly the model knew my patterns. It questioned me when I needed to be questioned. It kept me on track. It became that one brutally honest friend who annoys you into better decisions.
And yes — I’ve had to tell Claude to apologize a few times.
It can get very blunt.
P.S. - It's an ongoing work to make Claude or any AI give you a more refined and accurate answer every time. Even with these guardrails I have mentioned, it still goes places, makes assumptions, ... sounds like a human.
How I 100× Claude Code
Agents.
Agents for everything.
But not the chaotic “let it run wild” kind you see in hype videos.
In my master prompt, I define:
- The agents I have at its disposal
- The rules they follow
- The behaviors they must stick to
I still keep them on a leash. They are fantastic for small tasks, but if you blindly trust them to self-manage, they will eventually wander off and do something you did not intend.
If it can slip while you're watching, imagine what happens when you’re not.
How I 100× Regular Claude
(Without turning it into an unhinged automation gremlin)
I run MCP servers for everything.
MCP servers are widely misunderstood by the general audience. They are, in essence, special functions the AI uses to work. Like a tool in its toolbox. You should treat them almost as apps on your phone. But wait, where's the app store?
I find MCP servers in three places:
- Native Claude Desktop app
- MCP Toolkit from Docker — honestly, a lifesaver
- https://mcpservers.org (opens in a new tab) — great collection, but stay sharp; not everything is official (I’ve never had issues though)
Claude also has Claude Skills, which you can grab from that same site. They’re basically “agents but not limited to coding.” These are still growing on me, but I expect them to become a part of my daily work pretty soon.
And of course, if you don’t want to hunt for servers, agents or skills manually, just ask Claude or Claude Code to build them for you.
Building in public. Follow my journey at InvisiblePuzzle (opens in a new tab) where I document how I'm building B2B automation tools while working full-time.
Tags: #AI #claude #agents #mcp