AI Isn’t a Monster: How It’s Helping Me Untangle Life on the Farm

My neighbor has made their position on artificial intelligence fairly clear: “If you are using AI to make posters for your event, I ain’t coming.” Now, I respect a person’s right to decide how they spend their time. Nobody is being dragged into a yoga class against their will. But I have to admit, that particular line in the sand leaves me blinking into my coffee. We could be gathering to breathe, stretch, meet our neighbors, and feel a little better. Apparently, first we need to interrogate the flyer like it’s the true enemy.

I disagree with that mentality. Kindly, but completely. I can understand having questions about AI. I have questions too. What I struggle with is the assumption that using it automatically makes something less worthy of our attention, support, or participation. Over the past few months, this little program has helped me tackle some of the bigger chaos in my life. Here on our small North Florida farm, that help has been practical, creative, and occasionally the difference between starting a project and staring at it for another month. You all know how much of a “get it done” girl I am. THIS matters.

The Invisible Work Behind a Beautiful, Chaotic Life

When I say AI is helping me on the farm, please don’t picture a robot delicately harvesting tomatoes while another one reads poetry to the chickens. The chickens remain deeply unimpressed by technological advancement, particularly anything that fails to produce snacks. What I mean is that I have consulted AI to help with planning, writing, organizing, designing, cooking, and figuring out where the hell to begin. All those invisible jobs that happen before the visible job can happen? That is where this tool has been earning its keep.

There is a lot of life happening here. Animals, gardens, home projects, yoga classes, writing, family, and the endless maintenance involved in keeping a household reasonably functional. I love this life. I also occasionally look around and realize every single thing within my field of vision appears to need something from me. A beautiful life can still contain an absolutely unreasonable number of moving parts. Loving it does not make me immune to getting overwhelmed by it….on a daily basis.

One of the most useful things AI does is help me turn a brain full of competing tasks into a plan I can actually follow. I can bring it the whole tangled mess: house cleaning, unfinished projects, writing deadlines, things I keep forgetting, and things I keep moving from one list to another. It helps me sort through what needs attention and break larger jobs into smaller pieces. As a girl with anxiety issues, the relief of seeing a sensible next step is surprisingly powerful when everything previously looked like one enormous obligation.

We have worked on scheduling household tasks alongside my writing, with room for the yoga classes that are already part of my week. I have also used it to create garden task lists so fewer important little jobs disappear into the mental compost heap. Obviously, a list cannot guarantee I will remember everything. I remain capable of walking into a room with purpose and immediately forgetting my entire identity. But having the tasks somewhere outside my head gives me a much better chance.

That support fits with something I keep returning to in Not Making Someone Else’s Urgency Your Priority: I want more say over where my time and attention go. A calendar cannot set every boundary for me, but it can help me see what I have already committed to. It reminds me that writing, caring for my home, and doing things that restore me deserve space too. My own priorities should not have to survive on whatever scraps remain.

When AI Helped Me See My Home Differently

Then there is the house. If you read I Painted Over the Gray and Found Myself Again, you know that a little decluttering grew into a much bigger reset. AI helped me explore decorating ideas and visualize possibilities in our actual spaces. We worked with photographs, cleared away visual clutter in mockups, and considered how rooms could feel with a different direction. Seeing possibilities made it easier to move from vague dissatisfaction into decisions I could act on.

I still had to decide what felt like me. That part matters. A program does not know the feeling I want when I walk into my home unless I explain it, respond to its suggestions, and keep refining. I wanted color, warmth, personality, and room for the things I love. AI helped me work through those ideas. The sorting, donating, painting, rearranging, and actual living in the space remained very much a human operation, complete with dog hair and moments of questioning my ambition. (Have I mentioned how sheerly exhausted I am lately?)

It also helped me sort through the piles of clutter around our farm. There is something about having land and hobbies that makes almost any object look potentially useful. Gardening and stained glass do not exactly encourage a sparse relationship with supplies. This is why my sanity for those things lives OUTSIDE of the home in my sweet creative studio space. Getting help organizing the work gave me a way into it. I could focus on a manageable piece instead of mentally dragging every unfinished project into the room with me. A plan does not carry the donation bags, but it can get me moving toward them.

From “I Want to Build This” to an Actual Build Plan

My latest project; A giant greenhouse workbench is one of my favorite examples because it reaches beyond convenience into confidence. I wanted a large, useful workstation that fit the corner of our greenhouse and worked for the way I garden. We used the space measurements and photographs to develop an L-shaped plan, then adjusted it so the would stay clear of the roll-up door. We also accounted for lowering the existing water access and placing the retractable hose, a full sides sink, a dirt collection bucket with a removable cover and plenty of shelves to store all of my garden trays. . Actual needs, actual space, actual problem-solving.

That plan then became a materials list, a cut list, and a project sequence designed to help me take on the build myself. I adore the Hot Hub, and I appreciate my dad’s skills. I also love having a path toward doing something substantial without needing either of them to lead me through it. I’m talking about what the plan makes possible here, not announcing a finished bench. There are still measurements to verify and real construction decisions to make. Even so, having the project laid out makes it feel approachable. 100% doable and not at all overwhelming anymore.

That is a meaningful kind of help. “I want to build this” and “I understand the steps involved in building this” are very different places to stand. AI helped me cross some of that distance. We have also worked through paver quantities for the greenhouse area and compared board lengths and costs for replacing stair treads. Those are planning aids, with dimensions and product requirements still needing to be checked. But getting the arithmetic and options organized means I can ask better questions before buying materials.

What Can I Make With This?

The kitchen gets its share of assistance too. The Hot Hub and I use AI to come up with recipes based on ingredients we already have and to help modify recipes when something is missing. Sometimes the most helpful question in the world is simply, “What can I make with this?” I would prefer dinner to emerge from the food already sitting in my kitchen instead of requiring a special expedition for an ingredient I will use once and rediscover during the next major decluttering event.

Recipe suggestions give me somewhere to start, and substitution ideas help me think through alternatives. I still consider whether the suggestion makes sense for the dish. Baking, in particular, has opinions about chemistry that cannot be soothed with enthusiasm. I’m also not treating an invented recipe as tested guidance for canning or food preservation. For everyday meal ideas, though, it has been wonderfully useful. Some days I have plenty of creativity available for dinner. Other days the creativity budget was exhausted somewhere between the greenhouse and the laundry.

AI Helps Me Write, but the Voice Is Still Mine

Writing is another area where I use AI, and I want to be straightforward about that. I use it to proofread posts, catch mistakes, notice repetition, and help me work through wording when I am struggling somewhere. I also use it for brainstorming, outlines, and drafting support, including help shaping this piece from the experiences and opinions I supplied. It would feel a little ridiculous to write an essay about using AI and pretend the only assistance involved was moving a comma. The stories are mine, and I am responsible for what I publish.

That means I need to read the work, check the recommendations AI offers, and decide whether it sounds like something I want it to sound like. A polished and perfectly punctuated sentence is not automatically a truthful sentence. Neither is a confident answer. AI can misunderstand, invent details, and smooth away the very personality I want to preserve when I write and share here on my blog. I want help communicating clearly while keeping the dirt under the fingernails, the affection, and the occasional well-placed swear word. My life has never sounded like a quarterly corporate update, and I would hate to start that now.

There is research behind some of the time-saving potential. In a 2023 experiment by MIT researchers Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, professionals given access to ChatGPT completed certain writing assignments in 40 percent less time, while evaluators rated the output quality 18 percent higher. Those were specific tasks under study conditions, not proof that AI improves every piece of writing or every job. Still, the result makes sense to someone who has experienced how much easier it can be to work from a useful starting point.

I also use AI to help with SEO: search engine optimization, which is the work of helping people find what I publish through search. It helps me develop title ideas, descriptions, and relevant search phrases that will be seen by all of the different algorithms in the giant internet. I can care deeply about an essay and still appreciate help with the small technical details around publishing it. Google’s guidance on AI-generated content emphasizes quality and usefulness rather than a blanket rejection of AI. That is not a guarantee of rankings. My job remains creating something worth finding and being a voice that people WANT to read.

Yes, I Use AI to Make the Posters

Then we get to the posters that apparently threaten civilization. Yes, I use AI to create posters and artwork for my blog and the yoga studio where I teach. I use it for event headers, promotional images, and visual ideas that make it easier to invite people into what we are doing. It saves me a shit ton of time. I cannot find a more delicate phrase that accurately conveys my gratitude, so we will allow that one to sit there in its truth. Using AI images keeps my blog consistent and beautiful and it saves me time that I want to be spending in the garden and in my home.

I want someone looking at a yoga poster to feel welcome. I want the details to be clear and the invitation to feel warm rather than pushy. AI helps me create that material, and I still need to check the wording, dates, times, and images. The class itself involves real people showing up in a real space. My preparation, teaching, and care for the people in front of me remain my responsibility. An AI-assisted flyer does not cancel any of that human effort.

As someone who makes stained glass and loves creative work, I understand why artists have concerns. Questions about consent, training material, credit, and livelihoods deserve serious attention. So do concerns about privacy, misinformation, and environmental costs. I do not have to dismiss those concerns to describe how useful this tool has been in my own life. I can support human creativity and ask for better practices while also appreciating help with a community poster. There is room for a more thoughtful conversation than a blanket refusal to attend.

Building an Online Home Without Losing My Mind

AI also helped me design and build out the new Glimmers in Chaos website. We worked through the layout, colors, artwork, pages, and the many little technical pieces involved in creating an online home. Anyone who has worked on a website knows how easily “I just want to publish my writing” becomes an afternoon of menus, settings, and wondering why a perfectly reasonable image has suddenly decided to behave like a menace. Having help explaining and organizing those steps has made an enormous difference.

The supporting work has been just as useful: a publishing calendar, seasonal topic ideas, reader-tracking spreadsheets, Substack Notes, bookish conversation prompts for Snuggle Up Sunday, and materials for our book club. We have put together exercise printables too. These are practical tools I can use and adapt. Their value is in reducing how often I have to start from scratch. I want to spend more of my energy writing, teaching, making things, and connecting with people, with less disappearing into the preparation surrounding all of it.

I have written about wanting a quieter relationship with technology in The Great Social Media Exhaustion Era, and I still want that. Using AI has helped me clarify the difference between technology that takes my attention and technology that helps me finish something. I am interested in the second kind. My measure is fairly simple: does this make creating, publishing, growing readership, or connecting with readers easier? Does it help me get back to the life I actually want to be living?

The Tool Is Not the Human

So, to my neighbor, and anyone who feels similarly: you are welcome to make a different choice. You do not have to use AI, enjoy AI artwork, or share my enthusiasm. I would just ask that you leave a little room for what the help might mean to somebody else. For me, it has meant clearer plans, fewer stalled projects, more confidence, and an easier path through some very real overwhelm. That feels worth talking about without turning one another into villains.

AI has not weeded my garden, painted my walls, taught my classes, or carried a single bag of clutter out of this house. I am still here doing the work. But I am doing more of it with a plan, and I spend less time feeling defeated before I begin. Around here, that counts as a substantial glimmer. Now, if this thing ever learns to fold laundry, I will have a follow-up essay ready. Until then, help finding my next step is already a pretty wonderful thing.

Something to Ponder

What is one part of your everyday chaos where a little practical help would make the biggest difference? I would love to hear about it, whether you use AI already, remain curious, or have questions you are still sorting through. Pull up a chair. We can talk about it like neighbors.