You’re Only Using 10% of AI
From Prompts to Platforms: Unlocking AI’s Hidden Potential.
You’ve heard it before: humans only use 10% of their brains.
It’s not true, of course — but it feels like it might be true about AI.
Most people are using less than 10% of what today’s AI tools can actually do.
Not because the technology isn’t ready — but because they are stuck at the starting line.
The internet is full of advice on how to write better prompts. But that’s not what people really want.
People don’t want to become prompt engineers, they want AI that understands what they’re trying to do, remembers the context, and helps them build something real.
And when they try to go beyond the basics, they find out the hard way:
The other 90% isn’t locked way behind better prompts. It’s locked behind a minefield of edge cases, brittle memory, broken handoffs, and duct-tape integrations.
The 10% Illusion
For most people, “using AI” means opening a chatbot and asking it to rewrite an email, summarize a document, or suggest a few ideas.
And that’s on a good day, when you don’t catch you GPT lying, pretending to do a job 10 times when you can see with your own eyes the job has not even started yet!
But the reality is that this usage of AI is like buying a supercomputer just to keep a grocery list.
Moving beyond the simple use case of prompts and chats is where things start to break even further, get even more messy, and eventually… get amazingly powerful!
What Gets Harder Than It Should Be
When I started building with AI, I thought the hardest part would be writing good prompts or picking the right model.
I was wrong.
Here’s what actually got complicated:
Memory and Continuity
When an AI chat crashes or forgets your earlier messages, you don’t just lose a response.
You lose the whole thread of the conversation.
It’s like talking to someone with amnesia — every time you refresh, they forget who you are, who they are, and what the hell were you two trying to accomplish. Groundhog Day vibes!
Time Doesn’t Exist
Speaking of Groundhog Day, the movie: AI tools don’t really understand “now.”
They mix up timelines, forget what just happened, and can’t track what’s done versus what’s pending.
Try building a workflow that depends on timing, and you’ll hit this wall immediately. Try to enforce time-triggered events, or rely on time estimates, and you are in for a big surprise…
It’s All Held Together With Duct Tape
The deeper you go, the more you find yourself gluing tools together.
Juggling bits of code, plugins, agents, prompts, and files — none of it obvious, and none of it stable.
The Cost is a Mystery
I touched on this subject in a previous article, but the more I get into it, the more I am amazed about how little thought it was put on pricing (or maybe a lot, because arguably the less transparent the cost, the harder to switch or compare other products).
Token-based pricing for LLM models sounds simple until you scale up. Every provider counts differently. Subscriptions hit limits, then you get charged by API usage. Estimating usage becomes a guessing game. It is a nightmare.
You’re not paying for outcomes — you’re paying for words generated during the attempt.
The good news is: no matter how much you use these models, you will end up paying less than what you spend on your daily Starbucks run.
AI isn’t magic. It’s a stack.
To get serious about using AI, you need more than clever questions.
You need a system — a stack of components that work together.
Here’s what that may look like:
Conversation Layer: Keeps the chat smooth and coherent
Task Manager: Passes tasks between agents, retries if needed
Memory Keeper: Stores context, recalls what's important
Smart Tool Picker: Chooses the best AI model for each job
Debugging Layer: Logs issues, helps trace failures
Glue Code: Holds it all together behind the scenes
Most of this? You have to build or duct-tape together yourself.
That’s the price of going beyond 10%.
What Actually Gets Easier
Ironically, the things I worried about most turned out to be easy:
- Spinning up simple AI helpers? Done in a weekend.
- Switching between different AIs? Not hard at all.
- Building a basic UI? The AI can help with that.
- Writing code with little experience? Surprisingly doable.
But the moment you care about keeping track of things, working at scale, or handing off tasks reliably, you’re in infrastructure territory.
That’s where most people give up. That’s where the real value comes, too.
The Big Payoff
But if you push past the 10% mark — even just to 50% — something wild happens: You unlock a space where entirely new things become possible.
Just like Google Ads unlocked long-tail marketing, and YouTube empowered a generation of content creators, agentic AI — AI that can take actions and make decisions on your behalf — is about to unlock the long-tail builder economy.
You won’t need to be a developer to:
- Launch a micro-business
- Automate your personal and professional operations
- Invent niche services that were never economically viable before
Not because you learned to code — but because you learned how to stack, route, and delegate. Or someone else solved this for you… :P
What I’m Building Now
I’ve been deep into AI coding for almost a month now. With my limited coding expertise, my agents and I wrote well over 100,000 lines of code and multiple projects. Some of them failed. Actually, most of them failed. But in that process, I learned, I iterated, I understood what worked and what didn’t. I got to create my own system of agents that collaborate. I changed AI models, I screamed at the screen more than I would like to recognize. I also pulled more all-nighters than ever in my life. Not because my boss was pressuring me, but because I got addicted and excited about the possibilities.
I now know that the next wave of innovation will be the long-tail, AI-first builder economy, and that’s where I’m headed next:
I’m building tools, templates, and systems to help anyone go beyond the 10% — and reach the real power of AI, to help people:
Translate their needs and pains into product
Design their own AI workflows
Launch small, leveraged businesses
Become creators — not just of content, but of software and systems
We’ve had the creator economy.
Now we’re entering the builder economy.
And yes — it’s going to be weird, messy, and magical.
But it’s going to be more accessible than anything that came before.
What a time to be building.
Stay tuned!
Hit a minefield building with AI? Or just curious what 50%+ workflows look like? I’d love to hear from you.
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