The New Printing Press
In 50 years after the printing press, more printed material was created than in the previous 1,000 years. Literacy went from sub-1% to 70% globally. AI is on the same curve. Claude Code now authors 4% of all public GitHub commits. The title "software engineer" is being replaced by "builder."
But the printing press stayed on the shelf when you walked away. AI does not. This page is about using the new literacy without letting it consume you.
The tool safari never ends.
New model dropped. Watch the YouTube breakdown. Try Claude, try Cursor, try the new thing. Rebuild your workflow. Repeat. You tell yourself you are staying current. You are actually building the habit of not building.
The dopamine hit of configuring a new tool feels like progress. It is not. AI literacy is not about knowing every tool. It is about choosing a stack that compounds and then using it to ship things that matter.
Tools I actually use every day.
People ask me this constantly: "How are you using AI? What tools? What is your setup?" Here is the honest answer. Not every tool I have tried. The ones that survived the safari.
My thinking partner and co-pilot on the web. Open the sidebar on any page and
work with the latest models to refine, iterate, and learn. I built a shortcut
called /explain-smart-distracted
that tells the AI: "Explain this like I am smart but distracted. Get to the point,
but do not skip the nuance." It gets me up to speed on anything in seconds.
Voice-to-text that actually works. Speak naturally with filler words and rambling. It outputs clean, formatted text at 4x typing speed. Works in any app.
My mic setup: I clip a wired lav mic to my shirt with a magnet underneath. Hardwired is more reliable and sounds better. If you need wireless, this wireless option is a decent alternative.
Anthropic's agentic coding CLI. Not autocomplete. It plans, executes, and iterates across entire repositories. Skills and plugins make it a personalized development partner.
The terminal. Where Claude Code lives. Split panes, session restoration, and the ability to run multiple agents side by side. The cockpit for everything else.
Session orchestrator for AI coding agents. Manage multiple Claude Code sessions, attach MCP servers, create worktrees, and coordinate parallel workstreams.
The second brain. Local-first, markdown, fully searchable. Every podcast, article, and research thread gets captured here. AI augments thinking. Obsidian stores it.
Slash commands are the grammar of AI literacy.
Reading literacy has nouns, verbs, punctuation. You learn them once and they compound forever. AI literacy has the same thing: shortcuts, commands, reusable prompts. Without them, you are typing the same instructions over and over. You are stuck doing your ABCs.
A slash command like /explain-smart-distracted
is not a productivity hack. It is vocabulary. Once you have it, you think faster.
You stop asking "how do I prompt this" and start asking "what do I want to know."
That is the leap from using AI to being AI-literate.
Get to the point, but do not skip the nuance. Works on any page, article, or doc open in the Comet browser.
Stage, diff, draft a message, and commit. One word instead of five commands. Claude Code built-in.
Explore intent, requirements, and design before writing any code. Prevents building the wrong thing fast.
Multi-source synthesis with citations. When a quick search is not enough and you need real analysis.
It is not one size fits all.
The best way to build AI literacy is to watch what other people are building
and steal what works. I subscribe to the Anthropic Skills repo and get notified
every time someone submits a new skill. One week it is
teach-me-like-im-five,
the next it might be the one that changes your workflow.
These are the leading frameworks and skill repositories. Each one is a different philosophy on how to work with AI agents. Try them. Keep what compounds.
The official skill repository from Anthropic. Creative, technical, and enterprise skills that show what is possible. Subscribe to watch the community build in real time.
A complete development workflow built on composable skills. Brainstorming, TDD, subagent-driven development, code review. Your agent does not just write code, it follows a process.
Spec-driven development that solves context rot. Describe what you want, the system extracts everything it needs, and Claude builds it with fresh context per task. No enterprise theater.
AI-driven agile with 12+ specialized agents (PM, Architect, Developer, UX). Scale-adaptive intelligence that adjusts from bug fixes to enterprise systems. The most comprehensive framework of the bunch.
/brainstorming
- it forces a design conversation before any code gets written. Every project, no matter
how simple. "Simple" projects are where unexamined assumptions cause the most wasted work.
The medium does not stay on the shelf.
The printing press gave us literacy without taking our health. AI is different. It follows you to bed. It optimizes your dopamine loop. It makes the tool safari feel like productivity. The new literacy is rewriting you while you use it.
AI literacy is worth pursuing. But it requires a counterweight. Something physical. Something that reminds you what you are before the machines shaped you. That is why this site exists.
Build your AI stack. Then build your grip strength.
Hang Habit is a free iOS app that tracks dead hangs with your Apple Watch. The physical counterweight to your digital workflow.
hanghabit.com | For desk workers | Grip strength & longevity