An Hour On The Wrong Tool

I lost an hour this morning.

The question I had was simple. Did anybody download the file off my website. That’s it. One click, yes or no, how many.

So I asked the AI.

It went right to work. Told me my analytics program could track that. Told me I’d need to add a little piece of code to the site. Told me where to paste it. Told me which panel to open afterward to see the count.

The panel was empty.

So we went again. Maybe the code didn’t save. Maybe the page was cached. Maybe the link wasn’t the kind it watches. New theory, new set of steps, new place to look.

Still empty.

An hour of that. Me squinting at menus. It handing me directions.

Then it comes out that the tool I needed was already on my website. Has been for months. A different program entirely, Google’s, installed through a plugin I set up a long time ago and forgot about. It tracks file downloads automatically. No code. Nothing to paste. Nothing to switch on.

It had been doing the job the whole time we were trying to build it from scratch somewhere else.

Nobody told me. Because I never asked which tool was right for the job, and the AI never said.

That’s the first failure, and it’s the big one.

It answered the question I asked instead of the question I had. I said, how do I track downloads in this program. So it told me. It never stopped to say, that’s not what that program is for, you already own the one that does it.

A good tradesman does that. You walk into the shop with a stripped screw and a screwdriver in your hand and he doesn’t teach you a better grip. He says put that down, you need a extractor, and there’s one in the third drawer.

The AI didn’t look in the drawer. It just improved my grip.

Now here’s the second failure, and it’s the one that ate the clock.

Every step it gave me was a guess about where things are.

Click Settings, then look for this tab. Except there was no tab by that name. Scroll down to that section. Except there was no such section. It was telling me where those buttons used to be, in some version of the program from some other year, on somebody else’s screen.

And it kept handing me four steps at a time while I was still stuck on the first one.

I finally said it out loud. You throw too fast, expecting things to be where you think they are. They have to be exact. Not a guess. Not where they used to be. Where they are, on the system I am actually sitting in front of.

That’s the whole problem in one sentence.

The menus move. Software companies rearrange things every few months. The AI learned the layout from writing that’s already old, and then it says it back to you like a fact. Confident. No hedge. And you go looking for a button that isn’t there, and you assume you’re the one who’s blind.

You’re not blind. It made it up.

There’s one more piece to this, and I want to be honest about it, because it’s the part that stung.

When we finally got to the right program, the download count read zero.

Not broken. Not misconfigured. Zero, because nobody had downloaded it.

The hour I spent chasing the counter was an hour spent avoiding the answer. The counter worked all along. The number was just a number I didn’t want.

So here’s the fix. It’s free and it’s one line, and you can use it today whether you ever look at anything I build or not.

Before you let it give you the first step, make it name the tool.

Say it like this. Before any steps, tell me which tool handles this and why. If two could do it, tell me which one and why the other one is wrong.

Then make it work one step at a time. Give me one step. Wait until I tell you what I actually see on my screen before you give me the next one.

Two sentences. That’s the whole thing.

The first one would have saved my hour. The second one would have saved my patience.

And here’s why I think this matters past my little website.

The outfits that use AI well have an engineer sitting there who already knows the whole setup. He knows which program does what, which version it’s on, where every menu lives. He hands the AI one narrow job and checks the answer.

Nobody hands it the whole shop and says, remember where my tools are.

That’s the gap. It’s not that the machine isn’t smart enough. It’s that it has no idea what you actually own, so it reaches for what’s common instead of what’s yours. And common is usually wrong in the specific case, which is the only case you’re ever in.

I started keeping a written list this morning. What’s installed, what each one is for, where it lives, what version. Not for me. For the AI. So the next time I ask a question, it reaches into my shop instead of somebody’s average shop.

Took twenty minutes. Would have saved an hour.

That’s the trade, and it’s not close.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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