Work Stuff

This week I had a lot of strategic work, and while in last week’s review I wrote that I barely use AI for work now, this week it was the opposite: I returned to my most favorite and useful way of using AI - as a thinking partner. I asked Claude to help me write a product vision and strategy, but not by doing it for me, but by asking questions, clarifying, pointing out weak spots and suggesting unusual perspectives. This way of working, where we build the vision through dialogue (primarily in my head), seems to me the most valuable and productive way to use AI.

However, there was some vibe-coding too - instead of explaining a complex idea to colleagues, I made a prototype that demonstrates it in action. Though I’ll only find out tomorrow how much this actually helps with understanding the idea, when I show them the prototype.

I also needed to draw a simple BPMN diagram, and it turned out that in 2025 there’s still no way to do this quickly and without problems. All the web services I tried (primarily bpmn.io, draw.io, excalidraw), have small flaws that nevertheless make working with the diagram inconvenient, and for me this is a thinking process, and I want to be minimally distracted by aligning arrows.

Ideally, I’d want BPMN to appear in mermaid. I really love mermaid.

Mentoring

This week I had a meeting with one of my mentees, she had a question about team motivation and burnout. I prepared various cases from my experience for the meeting (and I have quite a lot of that experience), but her case turned out to be much harsher than anything I’d encountered. I shared with her how I would act in this situation, but overall I wasn’t prepared to help her with my experience, and realizing this was quite unpleasant.

TV Shows

The week turned out to be cognitively challenging at work, so in my free time there were lots of TV shows (this helps me switch off and not chew over work ideas in circles 24/7). Watched all the released episodes of “Pluribus” and several episodes of “The Day of the Jackal”.

Pluribus, of course, is full of ideas you want to think about and keep developing, but I can’t say it captivated me, while “The Day of the Jackal,” about which you can hardly say there’s anything new (essentially it’s management porn), unexpectedly keeps me on the edge of my seat. I’m not trying to compare them, it’s apples and oranges, but for the state of “can’t think anymore,” it seems apples suit me better.

Movies

Finally watched “One Battle After Another”. Maybe I’m in this kind of period, but instead of focusing on the film as is, I was watching DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, and thinking about aging. Gave the film 4 stars and a heart.

Games

Started playing Signalis (abandoned Silksong at the end of the first act, I have a life and I’m an adult, and I can’t spend hours fighting bosses, though maybe I’ll come back to it). Haven’t progressed that far yet, but already drawn into the atmosphere and story.

Looks like this was a week of generating ideas at work and consuming content all the rest of the time. I don’t really like this ratio, but sometimes there really is no energy left for creating outside of work. But I think the fact that work requires straining creative forces is a reason to be happy.