# How to Get the Most from AI This Summer — Transcript (2026-07-26)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-07-26 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

---

[00:00:00] Today on the AI Daily Brief

260726 lrs_EDIT: We're talking about your AI summer adventure. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Robots and Pencils, Rackspace, Blitzy, and Airtable To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. All right, it is a weekend, a summer weekend no less, and we are gonna go action-oriented today for this week's Big Think/Long Reads episode, we're actually gonna do two things, both of which are focused on the very practical. The first is that Professor Ethan Mollick has published the latest version of a blog post, which he's done a number of times, that's all about which tools he recommends for different tasks.

He [00:01:00] called it an opinionated guide which AI to use to do stuff, and so we're gonna look at all his recommendations in case they might influence the way that you want to experiment and change your workflows. Secondly, though, we're going to be introducing the latest

training program from AIDB. This one is at summeradventure.ai

and is a choose your own adventure to expanding your AI skills

pro-we'll talk about how it works and give you a preview of some of the projects

but let's start over with Ethan

The first thing that he notes in this new opinionated guide is that a lot has changed since the last time he did this In fact, he writes, what it means to use AI to do stuff encompasses so much more stuff than it used to. Until recently, using AI meant talking to a model through a chatbot in a constant back-and-forth conversation.

Now it means using an agentic system where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go."

By combining the brains of an AI model with a set of tools that let it plan and act for you. Basically, an agentic system gives an AI a computer to use.

So right up top, Ethan [00:02:00] divides his advice into these two categories And effectively he says

if you are just looking for some low stakes answer, such as asking a chatbot for a recipe or even asking it to help you write a letter or something Pretty much any model that you might use, including any of the free models, is gonna do well enough

On the other hand, for anything where you really care about the answer

You're going to wanna be using

one of the premier models like Fable or Five Six Soul

Set to a reasonably high thinking level

And when it comes to doing real intensive work Ethan argues that there are effectively only two choices right now, which is ChatGPT or Claude

Now it is worth noting 

Nathaniel Whittemore: that 

260726 lrs_EDIT: that means that Gemini is officially out of the rankings, at least at this point, which I don't think will come as a surprise to anyone, But still is pretty notable about the state of things

Now Ethan's next section is called Giving Your AI a Computer. and although he isn't using the word harness

He's effectively talking about the systems that you're going to put in place, including controls, permissions, et cetera

that are going to shape what the models can do

He says, for example, " I have the systems connected to my email, a non-private part of my Google Drive, and lots of other [00:03:00] applications, but you have to decide what you are comfortable with."

And it's clear that the nudge that Ethan is giving is to actually use these sort of connectors. He writes, "Once you are set up, you can do pretty powerful things. For example, I told both systems, ' Connect to my Gmail and help me prep for the MBA seminar I'm giving on Monday the 21st, including building some presentation and demos as inspiration.

Answer any outstanding messages on the topic.' Both systems got to work. They connected to my email and figured out the task, including correctly figuring out that the next Monday the 21st was in September, not August, and after that, they just started working, which is what agents do. They did research on the web, decided on a presentation demo, thought about how I might want to respond to the colleague who emailed me, and more.

About 10 minutes later, both returned answers, having created a range of teaching materials and writing an email to the colleague." This is impressive stuff that would have taken a couple hours of human work

But he says while Claude only prepared a draft, ChatGPT actually sent an email to my colleagues. What happened? Well, it was my fault. I had previously given ChatGPT permission to send email on my behalf, and Claude was told to ask me [00:04:00] first. So he says in one of his first big lessons, when you use these systems for real work, the permissions matter a lot.

Both companies let you decide whether the 

AI must check with you before acting, such as sending an email, buying something, or changing a file. Until you trust the system and understand its mistakes, leave everything to ask for approval first, which is the default

As you get more comfortable

Ethan suggests that you can expand how much of your computer the AIs have access to and get more complicated work as a result

Indeed, Ethan writes, "Probably the most interesting trick of these apps is that they can just use your computer the way you would. If you turn on the computer use option in Code or Codex, the AI can literally take over your mouse, browser, and computer.



260726 lrs_EDIT: Yes, this is a security concern, so you should proceed carefully, yet the results can be amazing. I asked ChatGPT 5.6 Sol in Codex to download a 3D modeling program and use it to create a very particular design. Download Blender and make an otter using a laptop on an airplane." He then shares a video of the AI doing exactly that.

" If you put this all together," he says, "you will find the AI can do almost anything that a person with [00:05:00] access to your computer can do. Sometimes much better, i.e., I have no idea how Blender works. Although sometimes worse. I'd rather make my own slides and write my own emails, thank you. But the AI keeps getting better, so the capabilities keep improving

Now clearly responding to some of the complaints that he still hears



260726 lrs_EDIT: In one of the examples he gives, he points out where people maybe have assumptions based on previous iterations of AI 

Nathaniel Whittemore: of AI

260726 lrs_EDIT: Ethan says, "I have a new book coming out in October. It has been through rounds of professional editing and proofreading, but I gave GPT 5.6 Soul and Codex the full PDF anyway and asked it to check it all over. The AI worked for 30 minutes, chased down 195 references, and gave me pages of notes that would've taken a team of researchers many hours.

One sign of how far AIs have come is that every one of the AI's notes was accurate, and there were no hallucinated page numbers, no invented text, no errors I could spot at all. In fact, I had the opposite issue. The AI was incredibly nitpicky Fortunately, I used my human judgment to reject these sort of complaints, which fits the theme that working with these systems is more like managing than it is [00:06:00] chatting.

You can almost think of the AI agents as a team you delegate work to

Nathaniel Whittemore: Now 

260726 lrs_EDIT: Ethan does come back to Google

He writes, " Google, which led on benchmarks not that long ago, has fallen behind it n- where it now counts. It has no leading frontier model and has nothing close to CodexCo- to Codex and Code. that is why I don't suggest Gemini as your primary system right now, though this could change quickly."

However, he says that doesn't mean that Google has nothing to add."

he points to Gemini Notebook, formerly known as NotebookLM

also some of their more rich media models like Gemini Omni, which works with video

Now Now overall, this is fairly simplistic

in fact, with absolutely no shade to Ethan, you might be sitting here thinking, " Wait, is that it?" But you have to remember that Ethan is writing to a much wider audience, and indeed probably a much less mature AI using audience than the folks who are listening to a daily AIAI podcast.



260726 lrs_EDIT: and what's interesting to me about this piece, especially as opposed to previous editions of this same idea, is that rather than going use case by use case and point by point and pointing to which model he likes, what Ethan is doing here is drawing a [00:07:00] bright line between two entirely different interaction patterns.

On the one side, there is the old chat-based interaction, for which pretty much anything will suffice, and on the other is this totally new managing agents pattern. It is very clear to me that Ethan is trying to make the agents management interaction pattern feel approachable and accessible for people who if they see words like harness

are just gonna have their eyes rolled to the back of their heads

But it really is a big shift in working. One that requires not only learning new skills, but reprogramming your brain. to, which is where now we get to the AI summer adventure from the AI Daily Brief and Superintelligent I have had a ton of fun over here releasing these various educational type experiences throughout the year

The first was AIDB New Year, which was a 10-week challenge that was meant to give you 10 basic skills of using AI

in a way that could level you up over the course of the first period of the year Tons of people engaged with that, including many in Teams

and given the context of what we were just discussing, [00:08:00] it's almost quaint looking back how many of the skills from that were really in that pre-agentic paradigm

Now a couple months later, as we all got familiar with agents and harnesses, and OpenClaw took over our brains, 

next up was Claw Camp This was a crawl through glass experience

Nathaniel Whittemore: 

260726 lrs_EDIT: designed to help you build agents in a way that really led to the learners understanding the guts of these systems and the type of opportunities that they represented

However, OpenClaw was onlyone platform And pretty quickly people stopped thinking about, "Can I build an agent?" To, "How do I use Claude Code or Codex or whatever harness I'm working within to build an actual agentic operating system that can help me do lots of different types of work?"

to, that's what led to Agent OS

Nathaniel Whittemore: which is still, I would argue, a totally valuable program to go check out if you haven't yet

260726 lrs_EDIT: That once again is a free self-directed program for building an agentic system that can help you do lots of types of work. devi-- Agent OS was designed by Nufar who also now leads our training programs at Superintelligent, including our executive catch-up program and our executive agent leadership program, Which is effectively the enterprise-grade version of Agent OS.

AI, now when it comes to [00:09:00] the AI Summer Adventure, this one is purposely designed To be more dynamic and fun and well, choose your own adventure-y

Building on,

building on the adventure and travel theme, it's organized into different destinations

Each of the 20 plus destinations 

has a lab or a project that allows you to learn some new skill



260726 lrs_EDIT: some of them are for beginners, some of them are for intermediate users, and some of them are even advanced

or you can filter them by level or by topic, with the topics being things like tools, agents and automation, building and creating or setting up knowledge and context

Once you complete a project, you can stamp your passport

the passport can be just for you

Or you can set it to public and share all the cool things that you've done

The more stamps you get

the more street cred you get. one stamp and we call you a day tripper. Three stamps and you become a certified AI explorer. At six stamps, you're a trailblazer, and at 10 stamps, you're a globetrotter

Is that the height of millennial cringe? Yes. Do I care? Not even a little

One thing I keep seeing in enterprise AI, [00:10:00] companies hedging across every cloud, every model, every framework, or paying a GSI for a pilot that never ends. The teams actually shipping, they've picked a lane and they move fast. That's one of the reasons I like today's sponsor robots and pencils. They've gone all in on AWS. They're an advanced tier and AWS pattern partner and they ship production AI coworkers in 45 days.

Speaker 9: That's led to them doing some of the more interesting work I've seen on AI coworkers. And by that I'm not talking about chatbots, I'm talking about actual Agentic systems that sit inside a business architecture and do real work.

That kind of focus matters if you're an enterprise leader trying to get something real into production or an AWS rep trying to move a customer from interested to deployed. Request an AI briefing@robotsandpencils.com. One conversation with robots and pencils and you'll know. 

Nathaniel Whittemore: One of the more interesting shifts in enterprise AI right now is how quickly the conversation is moving towards infrastructure and operations. As AI moves into core workflows, regulated data environments, and agentic systems, enterprises need governed infrastructure and inference that can operate [00:11:00] reliably day to day with clear operational accountability built in from the start.

As those systems scale, the operating model increasingly becomes part of the AI strategy itself

Rack-Rackspace Technology is the operator of the full enterprise AI stack, from agents to infrastructure across private cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge environments. Rackspace builds and operates governed AI infrastructure, inference, and production AI systems for organizations where sovereignty, compliance, and uptime are non-negotiable.

Their forward-deployed engineers stay embedded beyond deployment to help operationalize and run AI in live environments. to learn more about where enterprise AI runs and outcomes scale, go to rackspace.com 

Weekends are for vibe coding. It has never been easier to bring a passion project to life. So go ahead and fire up your favorite vibe coding tool. But Monday is coming and before you know it, you'll be staring down a maze of microservices, a legacy COBOL system from the 1970s, and an engineering roadmap that will exist well past your retirement party.

Nathaniel Whittemore: That's why you need Blitzie, the first autonomous software development platform designed for enterprise scale code bases.

Deploy at the beginning of every sprint and [00:12:00] tackle your roadmap 500% faster. blitzes, agents, est your entire code base. Plan the work

and deliver over 80% autonomously.

Validated end-to-end tested premium quality code at the speed of compute. Months of engineering compressed into days

vibe. Code your passion projects on the weekend. Bring glitzy to work on Monday. See why Fortune five hundred's. Trust blitzie for the code that matters@blitz.com. That's BITZ y.com. 

This episode of the AI Daily Brief is brought to you by Hyperagent where you run fleets of agents your team can manage together New users get 1000 in inference Forget local agents and chat workflows waiting on your laptop to be prompted Hyperagent deploys alwayson agents in the cloud doing real work across the tools your team already uses Marketing's agent turns competitor moves into landing pages sales agent enriches leads drafts emails and updates the CRM ops agent chases the paperwork and tracks the budget Every agent has access to shared context and follows your rules about scope and approvals It's time you add agents that feel like teammates Hire yours at Hyperagent built by the team [00:13:00] at Airtable Claim your 1000 in inference at hyperagent.com/aidailybrief. 

but part of what I'm excited about for the AI Adventure is that as you saw with both ClawCamp and Agent OS, a lot of the stuff that we were doing there was very advanced. Whereas when it came to AIDB New Year, a lot of it was really accessible. It was meant to be for people who were still just getting their feet under them when it came to AI.

260726 lrs_EDIT: We've brought more of that back with AI Adventure, and so if you have friends or colleagues or even yourself have just areas where you feel really behind

Even some of the beginner quick trips might be something that you wanna check out

tri- one example of a quick trip project we're calling Pack Your ID This is, of course, a context project that helps you build a profile of yourself that you can give any AI you're interacting with

so that it has better context about you and can provide you better, more contextual results

The way that The way that these projects or labs work is that they're each gonna come with a set of instructions and some set of core tasks, [00:14:00] including prompts that you can copy. So for example

this is a complex prompt that asks the AI to, quote, "Help me write and install a lightweight global identity for this AI product so future chats start knowing who I am." 

Nathaniel Whittemore: 

260726 lrs_EDIT: the prompt involves figuring out where standing personal context should live based on the current system

it instructs the AI to interview the user to draft a short brief

Then finally, it asks the AI to produce

One, a Paste Ready global ID block of roughly 150 to 300 words written as instructions to a future AI assistant. Two, exact install steps for this product's current UI. And three, one test question I should ask in a fresh chat to verify it loaded, i.e.,

something only my ID would answer well

Now for each lab or project, we're also gonna provide some additional layers, i.e. project extensions

Nathaniel Whittemore: in this case, it's add a second block, how to push back on me, when to challenge, when to ask a clarifying question, when to refuse a vague request

260726 lrs_EDIT: And finally, we're also gonna give you a stretch goal

Now when it comes to the Pack Your ID, There is actually an even more advanced version of this [00:15:00] context project called Personal Brain

i.e., a small set of files that teach any AI who you are, what you're working on, and how you like things done

This is basically a context pack

of the type that I shared at contextportfolio.ai in that portfolio builder, but organized as a personal learning experiment instead

Now, if these quick trips are easy ways to get more from the AI you already have

Excursions are a type of project where you are going to build something that actually outlasts the current session

Nathaniel Whittemore: the personal brain that I was just talking about is an example of that but we also have excursions for

260726 lrs_EDIT: directing a complete and finished creative piece. I not just one-shot prompted, but actually a full complete AI-generated creative project

there is an excursion for vibe coding something

I know that as much as we talk about these tools, there are still plenty of people that just haven't had the time or bandwidth to actually go build their first application, which I believe is genuinely one of the biggest unlocks that you can have using AI right now. and more than just about anything else you can do, will shift you from thinking of AI

as an assistant that can [00:16:00] help you do your current work faster, cheaper, or better to something that unlocks totally new capabilities

And then for those who wanna be really ambitious, we have what we call expeditions, which are meant to totally change how you work with AI

There are two expeditions that are live right now

The first is called Lemonade Stand and the goal of it is to actually create an AI-staffed micro business 

with a real ready-to-run demand test

not, now this one is not just for entrepreneurs or solopreneurs Even for folks who are completely happy in their day job and sure they'll never leave

Going through the process of 

designing a complete micro business is going to have incredible learning effects for how you use AI in your normal context as well

now this particular expedition is organized into three sprints

discover-- in the discovery sprint, you'll extract non-trivial ideas from your history, skills, access, and external idea labs, leading to a short list of five to eight ideas and a ranked top three withfounder fit notes, i.e. which of them seem most likely to be a good fit for you.

Sprint two is about [00:17:00] creating a business plan. Taking one of those top three concepts And mapping it as a real micro business with an AI org chart

including a week one task list, a one-pager plan, and an AI staff map



260726 lrs_EDIT: the third sprint is the validation sprint, where you learn to test demand before you overbuild, including a thin demo for software

An experiment designed and getting real signal from a human Now again, each of these sprints is going to 

come with a core task or a set of tasks, and a copyable prompt that you can drop into whatever AI you're using

Now importantly, especially when it comes to the more extensive excursions like this

the copyable prompt may be more about getting you started

and indeed, many of the prompts actually open up an entire set of conversations and interactions between you and the AI



260726 lrs_EDIT: for example, in the idea mining sprint

The copyable prompt actually organizes things into a set of phases that include things like a deep interview 

by the AI of you to help it figure out what business ideas might be a good fit

Now, especially for some of these more complex ideas, the AI Adventure Platform is also going to come with a set of [00:18:00] resources

for where you can go deeper



260726 lrs_EDIT: that I, one more expedition that I wanna sell you on, we're calling the loop. Now, you have heard me talk endlessly about loops on this show

Where you take a well-defined task with test builds and diffs, the agent can recheck

but applying it in non-technical work is in many ways more difficult or at least less intuitive than it is in applying it to software engineering. The goal of The Loop Expedition is to help you walk through building an actual agentic loop in an area of work that is useful for you

now before this one even gets into the prompts and steps, there is a bunch of background learning that's going to get you more familiar with the concepts as well

Some of the sections include what a loop is and isn't, costs, models, and how loops fail

and how to fire a loop in major tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex

you listen, now once you listen to this show, is going to be fully live. You can sign up for free and start ticking in

So far, about half of the destinations are unlocked, and each week here through the end of the summer in the US, i.e., basically the beginning of September, we'll be unlocking even more [00:19:00] projects

Some of those projects we already have planned, but some of them we're anticipating building on the fly based on what's happening in the industry Who knows? Maybe we'll go build ourselves a model router, given that it seems like everyone else on the planet has at this point

up a new, we'll also set up a new sub-community for people who are doing the Summer Adventure on the AIDB Operator Circle. and I'll include links to sign into that in the show notes as well

As we As we wrap up here, one of the concepts that has been most important throughout 2026 especially is this idea of the capability overhang, the gap between what AI can do and what we're actually using it for. Now, I would contend that there is almost no one on the planet who doesn't have some capability overhang that they are dealing with

Even researchers inside the labs Even content creators whose entire job is to pay attention to what is happening in AI and try out everything new. con- there is simply not time enough to do everything that we would like, and AI capabilities keep racing ahead.

The goal of the Summer Adventure

is to find fun ways for you to [00:20:00] close your own personal capability gap around whatever part of that gap matters most to you and actually have a good time doing it

As always with programs like this, the summer adventure is completely free

You can sign up at summeradventure.ai, and I'm excited to see you there

For now, that's gonna do it for today's episode. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

​ 

Nathaniel Whittemore's audio recording: