January 13, 2026
I've been using AI more and more recently, so much so that I have a tab open on chrome all the time now. On a recent project at work, I spun up a local unraid server using a PC tower that was just sitting around. We run a bunch of python scripts to help automate some of the work we do, but it's been via windows task scheduler. It became messy to use. I decided I wanted to use Windmill.dev after reading about it and wanting a more robust automation system. I asked AI how to deploy the docker container on our unraid server, and like most chats, it just gives you a long list of todo items. I know this is context dependent, which we'll get to in a minute, but have AI just write and write and write and then you have to scroll and scroll and scroll became frustrating. Esepcially when you do what it tells you and it doesn't work or it fails. So I added this extra: "Please walk me through step by step and wait for me to continue each step.". Wow, what a difference it made. It only responded with a short intruction and if it worked I told it to continue. If it failed, I gave it the error message, and it would fix it (or try to). It's basically a super small iterative loop. I've been using this added context a lot more and it's been incredible how much more I've been able to accomplish. I highly recommend trying it next time you need some step-by-step instructions.