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The top use cases for AI in 2026 are:

  1. Therapy and companionship
  2. Troubleshooting
  3. Fun and nonsense
  4. Fan fiction and storytelling
  5. Technical use of software
  6. Autonomous agentic operations
  7. Relationship advice
  8. Work buddy
  9. Astrology and tarot readings
  10. General advice

My use cases are 6, 5, 2, 10, and a little bit of 8. Might need to look into Astrology and tarot readings though, as it seems a natural fit for AI’s hallucinations. 🤪

Does your AI work for you or is it the other way around?
Whenever you’re pasting the output the AI gives you into another application, you’re just acting as a meat proxy (the next Times Word of the Year?).

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

Nicholas explains the master list:

How do you use it?
  • Capture everything on it at any time, day or night. Work or play. For that reason, I prefer a paper notebook. It can be on my desk, in a vacation roller bag in a gym back-pack. It does not need electricity; it does not need wi-fi; it can’t ‘go down’.
  • Towards the end of the day, scan it and break down sizeable items into smaller ones so that everything is both brain (I can do that!) and time (20-minute chunks) friendly. Only your eyes and your brain can do that.
  • Then create your day list for tomorrow, bearing in mind pre-booked meetings and thus your true availability.
  • Tomorrow, work your day list!
Nicholas Bate

Should you move your work to AI or bring AI to your work?

This weekend, a post by Matt Webb kept appearing in my feeds, shared by Simon Willison and others. It discusses something Matt calls “context plumbing” in AI systems.

This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as close as possible to the point of user intent).

So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be.

But I think we’ve got this backwards.

The real question: Where should AI live?

Instead of moving context to the AI, we should move the AI to where the content already lives. This isn’t just a technical distinction. It’s a fundamental difference in how we think about AI’s role in our work.

The big AI companies want to create “everything apps.” They’re building platforms that pull all your content, all your context, into their systems. And the motivation is clear: they’ve made enormous investments and need to avoid AI becoming a commodity with razor-thin margins.

But what actually benefits you as a user?

AI as feature, not platform

Having AI incorporated into the tools you already use makes more sense than abandoning those tools for an AI platform. Apple may be lagging behind in the AI race by some measures, but their vision resonates with how people actually work. Apple Intelligence in the Mail app is one of my most used AI features precisely because it’s where I already spend time managing email.

Or consider my workflow in Tana, where I manage my work and knowledge. I can run AI, any model I choose, right on my task list. On my meeting notes and transcriptions. In my journal entries. The AI comes to where my thinking already happens, rather than forcing me to export everything to a separate AI platform, or, as Matt Webb calls it, create a plumbing system to get my context into the AI.

This is the difference between AI as infrastructure and AI as destination.

The platform trap

When AI becomes a platform, you face a choice: either duplicate your work across systems or abandon your existing tools entirely. Neither option serves you well. Duplication creates synchronization headaches and version conflicts. Abandonment means losing the specialized features and workflows you’ve built over time.

The alternative is simpler. AI becomes a feature that enhances the tools you already trust. It’s there when you need it, invisible when you don’t, and it never asks you to restructure your entire digital life around it.

I see AI as a feature and have no intention to use it as a platform. The question isn’t whether AI is powerful or useful. It clearly is. The question is whether that power serves your workflow or disrupts it. Whether it meets you where you work or demands you come to it.

The answer shapes not just which tools you choose, but how you think about the relationship between your work and the technology that supports it.

An Outliner tool is a key digital list making aid (even if they all have their limitations). A good Outliner allows you to put making lists ‘on rails’ as Dave Winer put it.
Moving an item up or down, to the top or the bottom. Nesting a thing under another, or deeper still. Moving a nested item up a level of hierarchy. Hide the subitems under a thing, or revealing them. Make a connection with an element elsewhere in an outline or with/in a different outline. Turn lines into bullets into numberings and back. Switch between different types of visualisation, one of which is the outline. All made seamless with keyboard shortcuts.

This is one of the (many) reasons I prefer an outliner-based notes tool like Tana over a notes-based tool like Obsidian.