You Must Draw Your AI Workflow to Control It
I have been building my own workflows, working in tandem with AI, for over a year now. Like many others, I started by giving Claude Code access to my existing Obsidian vault, and did a lot of things ad hoc. Then I installed OpenClaw, and promptly removed it again. So that I could reach everything remotely, I rented a VPS to run Claude Code from my phone, and started scheduling tasks. I then built my own project review board to bring GTD to my work, and moved to Telegram bots and several agents with small remits to organise the work further, which I am still experimenting with.
I have built a lot of stuff. A lot of it even works.
However, many of the AI systems that AI has built for me are no longer useful. Some of it has rotted, or is less useful than before, but still runs. It costs me time to review (though not enough to make me turn it off) and a tiny but growing token tax.
Plenty of companies I speak to have the same issues, multiplied. Broken workflows are a far greater burden when they infect an entire organisation, and people are trying to get to grips with them and organise them.
In all of this I have realised that there is no shared vocabulary yet for the AI routines that run my life and work. We hear people say “I have automated my business using AI”. But how do they keep it going? How do they know where their data is? How can we even describe everything they are running? We generate endless artefacts and share them with others, yet it is hard to know what data drove them, or whether other people are even allowed to see them.
