Most people use AI. I wanted to manage it.
There’s a difference. Using AI typically means opening a chat window and starting an isolated conversation. Managing it means building a system that knows your priorities, remembers your history, and gets better the longer you work together.
Having managed teams for 20 years, I knew how to onboard someone. You start them small. You give them low-stakes tasks. You build trust before you hand them the keys.
I applied the same logic here. First, connect it to my calendar and ask it to help me plan my day. It worked. Barely. Todoist came next, so it could see my schedule and my task list and help me prioritize what actually mattered that day.
Then I got ambitious. I wanted a consistent voice across my entire job search: resume, portfolio, case studies, all of it. So before touching a single file, we built a communication style document. Not a vague “be direct” kind of guide. A real one that matched my style and personality. No corporate language. No over-explaining. The overall feel was a smart friend, not a consultant.
The interesting part is that I built a style guide specifically to make AI output sound less like AI. And it works. Everything that comes out of the system sounds like me. Or close enough that editing it feels like light revision, not a rewrite.
What makes all of this possible is the file structure. Claude chat resets after every conversation. Every session starts from scratch. Claude Code can read and write files, and connect to outside tools. The memory, the context, the style guide, the skills all live on within my assistant. Every conversation picks up where the last one left off because the knowledge is in the system, not in the chat window.
The Figma integration is where the dynamic really shifted. My resume is built in Figma, but it wasn’t readable by the machine scanners recruiters use. So we connected Figma directly to the assistant. Now I describe the change I want. The assistant makes it. I open Figma to review, give notes, and send it back. I’m the art director. The assistant is the team.
It’s still not perfect. A good assistant who occasionally needs a reminder of the brief. I’ve learned that’s less about the tool and more about how I manage it. The same lesson I’d give any new manager.