Remember that list?
I made a different one.
At the very beginning of this newsletter, in May 2026, I showed you a list.
Fourteen names. ChatGPT. Copilot. Gemini. Grok. Perplexity. NotebookLM. Claude. And seven more, the last few obscured by my own thumbs, because even holding the list felt like too much.
It was a list of things to learn. Tools to evaluate. A homework assignment I hadn’t signed up for, written in a language I didn’t speak yet.
I want to show you a different list.
This one I made myself.
Not a list of tools someone else built. A list of things I built — with AI, since April, starting from exactly the same place you might be standing now.
I’m not going to name them all here. They each get their own post, their own story, their own moment of I can’t believe that worked. But I’ll give you a hint at what’s on it.
There’s a tool for my pantry. It knows what I like to cook, what I usually have on hand, and it doesn’t suggest recipes that require seventeen ingredients I’ll never use again. There’s a tool for my to-do list — not the generic kind, but one that works the way my brain actually works, which turns out to be quite specific and not at all how productivity apps are usually designed.
There’s a tool built entirely around my BA instincts — gated, controlled, structured so that I understand everything being built before the next step begins. Because some of us need to know what’s happening under the hood, and it turns out you can build for that.
There’s a tool where I store my innermost thoughts. My obituary. My book of me. The silly metaphors I reach for when I’m trying to explain something. The strands of stories that might one day become something larger. A place that holds the version of me that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
And then there are the others. A memory game, built on a Tuesday afternoon because I wanted to see if I could. A travel planner that pulls together a holiday I’d actually want to take — not the Top 10 Things To Do that appears in every search result regardless of who’s asking, but something shaped around what I specifically want from a trip. A tool that generates image prompts when I need a picture and my imagination has gone quiet. A tool that helps me stay on top of this blog and keep Substack on schedule without the whole thing collapsing the moment life gets busy.
A social media tool. A scrapbook layout tool. A tool for my other part-time business, the one that has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with paper and scissors and the particular satisfaction of making something by hand.
More than a dozen things. All of them built since April. None of them existed before I made them.
Here’s what I want you to notice.
The first list asked me to choose. To evaluate. To decide which tool was worth my time before I’d had time to discover what any of them were actually for.
The second list didn’t start with a choice. It started with a problem. A small one, specific, something I needed that didn’t exist. And then another. And then another.
I didn’t set out to build a list. I set out to solve a problem. The list is just what happened while I wasn’t watching.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about walking through the door.
You stop counting the tools. You stop worrying about which one to pick. You just start working — and the work turns out to be the point all along.
The first list was about AI.
The second list is about me.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.