Build an AI jig

AI can help protect the quality of your recurring tasks — on the rushed days, the tired days, the fortieth-time-this-quarter days. It’s a trick woodworkers have used for generations. They call it a jig, and you can build one in an afternoon.

Say you're putting new knobs on twenty kitchen cabinet doors. Every hole has to land in exactly the same spot — same distance from the corner, same height — or the whole kitchen looks subtly, permanently wrong. You could measure and mark each door by hand, twenty times, and hope your hand stays steady on a hole you can't undo. Or you could use a jig.

A jig is a guide you set up once that holds the "right way" in place, so you stop having to find it every time. For the cabinet knobs, it's a little bracket that hooks over the corner of the door and drops the drill bit exactly where the hole belongs. You don't measure. You don't mark. You hook it on, drill, move to the next door. Door one and door twenty come out identical — because the correctness relies on the jig, not on your attention.

Crafters know the same trick by another name. If you've ever heatpressed a design onto a t-shirt, you know it has to sit centered and square to the neckline, and that eyeballing it leaves you with a logo that's a little crooked on at least one shirt. So people use a placement template that shows exactly where the design goes each time.

You'd expect that the more experienced someone gets, the less they'd need a guide like this. Surely a pro could just measure the hole or eyeball the center. So why is it the people doing this at volume — the ones who care most about it coming out right — are the ones who reach for a jig?

Experts know doing it the same way every time is as important as skill. Humans, even great ones, are a variable process. You can drill one hole perfectly by hand. Drilling twenty identical ones, by hand, while tired, is where it falls apart.

So instead of leaning on their skill to get it right every single time, they apply their expertise to build the jig once — fussing over it, testing it, adjusting until it’s perfect. After that, the jig helps them perform at their highest skill level. Hook it on, drill, move on — and all are expert level.

A jig is more about quality then speed. In theory a jig saves you the cost of a redo, but if it’s your own kitchen, you won’t replace the door. You’ll live with it — and be mad every time you walk in.

Building a jig can look like a waste if you measure only on time saved. But don’t let an efficiency mindset talk you out of building one for quality.

When do you need an AI jig?

Think about your everyday work. A recurring task where you know what good looks like and getting it right requires precision, not inspiration. Something where the operation stays the same while the material changes — same hole, different door; same report, different data.

You probably know exactly what a good version of a recurring report looks like. You can produce a great one when you're fresh, when it's the first one, and when nothing's on fire.

But you don't produce it once. You produce it forty times a quarter, and the fortieth comes out the way late-day freehand cuts come out — a little off, a little inconsistent, missing the thing you'd have caught at nine in the morning.

The variance isn't in your skill or knowledge. It's in having to apply that knowledge by hand, from scratch, every single time.

An AI jig is the fix and building one is easy.

A custom assistant is the most common form. Write instructions once — steps to follow, what to include or leave out, and what good output looks like. After that, you just give the assistant raw material and it runs the same way every time.

Someone in research might build one that creates discussion guides or standardizes screening questions. Someone running projects might build one that creates project plans or debriefs. Someone using AI as a thinking partner might build one for a specific method.

For example, my What Would Have to Be True assistant takes any half-baked idea and runs it through the same four moves. Rigorous thinking no longer riding on whether the day has gone sideways.

A template the AI fills out is the stricter form. An assistant has room to decide — what to include, how to word it. A template gives it none. The structure is locked, and the AI’s only job is to drop this round’s content into the same slots, in the same order. A monthly report where the numbers change but the layout never does, for example. I’m building a few of these now, and I’ll share what works in a future post.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything. The ordinary work — the report, the weekly update — is the work you’re probably known for, whether you meant it to be or not. A jig helps keep that work at your best, even on the days you’re not.

You don’t need a big idea to start. Notice the recurring task that’s sometimes less than your best, and build the guide that sticks the landing every time.