This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

Last season on the Platformer podcast, we explored what AI means for jobs — including the risk that huge numbers of them might soon go away. For our follow-up miniseries, I wanted to ask a more practical question: what can any of us actually do about it? Over the coming weeks, I'll be talking with people who can help us map which AI tools and strategies might help us keep your advantage at work — for now, at least.

And there's no better person to join me first than David Pierce. I've known David for about as long as I've been a tech reporter, and over that time he has become the tech press's chief productivity correspondent. He worked with David Pogue at the New York Times, edited at Wired, wrote the personal technology column for the Wall Street Journal, and served as editorial director at Protocol before returning to The Verge.

Today he is now editor-at-large, co-host of The Vergecast, and author of Installer, his weekly guide — and the most delightful newsletter I read each week — about what to download, watch, and try. More recently he has launched Version History, a show about the defining products from tech's past, from the hoverboard to Vine, and what they can teach us about its future.

Like me, David is a fiend for testing new productivity tools. He estimates that he has personally installed, used, and abandoned some 200 to-do apps — a number limited, he told me, "by the number of them that exist — not by the number of them that I'm willing to try." (He had actually switched notes apps the day we recorded our conversation.)

All that tinkering has left him with a usefully unromantic view of the current moment. "We're in a moment where everyone has decided that everything about how we do everything is about to change," he told me. "But actually, none of it has changed yet."

In David's telling, the returns on AI at work have so far been fairly modest. It's really good at the busywork of daily life — converting a folder full of files, clearing a thousand marketing emails out of your inbox in 45 seconds, or finding you a plumber. What it can't do consistently is exercise good judgment about what matters to you. When David set AI loose on his primary inbox, it "started getting almost everything wrong," he said — fooled by senders who make every message sound like a five-alarm fire, in what he suspects is the beginning of annoying new attention hack.

But what I found most refreshing in our conversation was his message to anyone who is feeling left behind by the AI era. "I think staying ahead is wildly overrated," he told me. "This idea that everyone is selling — that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind — is pernicious and frankly wrong." His advice is straightforward and narrow: offload the dumb tasks, keep doing the work that builds your understanding, and when the hype starts to feel overwhelming, find-and-replace the word "AI" with the word "software." "It's just software, and that's OK," he said. "Sometimes it's very good software. But you should treat it like software."

A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton. And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.

Casey Newton: David, most people try to minimize the number of new apps they install. You go out of your way to find new ones. Give us your sicko credentials up front: how many to-do apps do you think you've personally installed, used, and abandoned?

David Pierce: Oh, wow. Conservatively? 200. If you made me pick a number, it's probably somewhere in that range. And that's limited by the number of them that exist, not by the number of them that I'm willing to try.

Newton: If there were 400, you would have installed 400.

Pierce: Without question. All the way back to my first experiences with smartphones 20 years ago, the very first thing I downloaded in the App Store was Evernote, which tells you something about who I am as a person. This has been an ongoing journey. Especially as my professional life has gotten busier, and my personal life has gotten busier next to my professional life, it has gone from a thing I do because I think it's interesting to a thing I do both because it's interesting and out of deep necessity to remain a person.

In that sense, the last 18 months have been totally fascinating. We're in a moment where everyone has decided that everything about how we do everything is about to change. But actually, none of it has changed yet. So we're in this complete chaos phase of trying to figure out what the future of any of this stuff is before any of it has settled. It's delightful.

Newton: Let's dive into the chaos a bit. You're infamous for a perpetual quest to find the best notes app. After all your years of tinkering, what has actually survived, and how solid does your current setup feel?

Pierce: Nothing, and incredibly fragile, is the honest answer. I've learned pretty explicitly what I need. I spent a long time building really elaborate systems that would make sure everything was in its right place. I knew exactly how everything was going to be organized, tagged, and put in projects. I could tell you the lexicon of every single app that existed.

I discovered that actually, the problem was I would make these really beautiful to-do lists and never look at them. Just never. I'd be like, "Well, that's weird — I don't do anything on my to-do list. Maybe I'll get a new to-do list." So the biggest change for me has been figuring out what I need to be successful.

The problem is I've become very clear on that, and now there is this incredibly annoying thing happening where there are a handful of apps that all have every feature that I want minus one. Then they keep adding things that are like the thing that I want, so I go back to try that app. I realize it still doesn't have the actual feature that's very important to me, so I leave for one of the other ones that has it. I'm in this cycle between five apps — I'm switching between Todoist and Reminders at all times, for a variety of reasons, and then I'm bouncing between four or five notes apps depending on which particular pain point I'm willing to put up with at a given time. I switched today, Casey. This is not a bit. I switched notes apps today.

Newton: What did you switch from and to, and why?

Pierce: I'm just an insane person; no one should ever hear me say this out loud. I switched from an app called NotePlan, which I really like. Obsidian has become this very popular app by building an app on top of a set of Markdown files. I think that idea is very important: that fundamentally, the thing at the base of it should be a bunch of things that I own, that do not exist in some proprietary format that's hard to get out and read on another device. I have a folder of files that I can upload to Google Drive, put on a thumb drive, print out, and hand to my wife. That's very important.

NotePlan takes that idea and spins a bunch of really interesting task-related stuff on top of it. Obsidian is very good for writing notes; NotePlan is much more geared toward being a daily notes and tasks app, and it does it very well. So I used it for a long time. Then there's Craft — which is the white whale of my productivity applications, because it is the one that is closest to doing everything correctly. It's almost a really great calendar app, it's almost a really great notes app, and it's almost a really great tasks app. Every time they make a tiny bit of progress in one of those directions, I throw my entire life back into it, run into the edges again, and leave.

The update today was that they've done a much better job of integrating tasks around the app, so now you can see all of the relevant tasks everywhere you're supposed to. Which sounds like a small thing, but it's just not how it worked before. Now it integrates with Apple Reminders, so I can tell my phone, "Remind me to water the grass tomorrow morning," and now that is in my daily note in Craft. That is a very important little bit of synergy that makes this stuff go a long way. So for now, I'm in Craft. By the time anyone hears this, there's a strong chance I will no longer be in Craft.

Newton: And when you say you're in Craft, you are also in Reminders. Does that mean you're also in Todoist as well?

Pierce: Todoist and Reminders are two apps with opposite strengths for me. My running theory of all this stuff is that capture is the most important thing by a mile, and none of the rest of it matters. I think AI is actually increasing that fact. You don't have to build a system; you don't have to care about where any of it is, because we actually have technology that is making it easy to find and organize these things after the fact. The whole idea is being able to get it out of your brain and into something. It's useless in your brain, and it's incredibly useful as long as it is somewhere.

Reminders I really like because it has unparalleled Siri integration; it's the cleanest way I've ever found to get something out of my head and into a system, so I always end up coming back to it, because it's so fast. Todoist is a vastly better app for managing projects and to-dos, but most of the time, what I actually need is just a list of all my tasks. I don't need it any more complicated than that. Reminders, because it does a good job percolating around other apps too, is mostly the one I've gravitated to.

Newton: When you interviewed your colleagues at The Verge about their productivity systems, the lesson you took away was that simplicity and a single source of truth beat the perfect system. Why are those two elements so essential?

Pierce: Having a single source of truth solves two problems at once, and we don't think enough about either of these problems. It's knowing where to put it, and then it's knowing where it is. I think that is the whole thing. I see this with people all the time, because I've made myself public as a productivity nerd, so people love to talk to me about this stuff. You can have the best-fit solution for every individual thing: "If I have this link, I'm going to put it over here. And if I have this thing that I need to do, I'm going to put it over here. But then if I have this other Google Doc..." What actually happens is all the systems break down, because there's too much friction to put stuff anywhere.

So the idea of saying, "This is the place I put things," is the single most important thing you can do. Then the reverse of that is: I know where it is now. You don't have to build some elaborate system that will reveal it to you at the right time; you don't have to jump from app to app to figure out where this thing is that you were doing the other day. People have this experience all the time — "Is this in my email? Is this in Slack? Is this in Google Docs? Is it in my to-do list app? Is it in my notes app?" The fewer places that can possibly be, the more likely you are to actually go interact with that thing.

And then this is the newest part of my theory, and I'm curious how you feel about this. I've become a big believer in mess in those spaces. I used to think I didn't want to see any tasks that I didn't need to worry about right now; I only wanted to have the most important things in front of me every minute. Then I started talking to authors and very productive people working on lots of creative projects. What they discovered is that actually seeing things over and over again is really important. That I'm forced to wade through my to-do list every day makes me more likely to accomplish the things on it, because it plants them back in my brain. It helps create connections between things. You should be confronted by all of your stuff as often as possible. That's another reason having fewer places for that stuff is really valuable.

Newton: Right — and this is the logic of seeing your tasks in an app like Craft: you're going there in the morning, starting a daily note, looking at your calendar, and all the to-do lists are right there. If folks take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that simplicity is your friend and a single source of truth is your friend.

Interestingly, most of the stuff we've talked about so far is not very high-tech — most of these tools could have been built in 2010. We've seen a lot of productivity fads over the past 15 years: Inbox Zero, Getting Things Done, second brains. Now I think we're in some sort of Claude Code, Obsidian and OpenClaw moment. What do you think AI has genuinely changed about the way that normal people work in the last year?

Pierce: Not as much as I would have thought, to be honest. There is a certain kind of annoying maintenance task that people are really quickly starting to learn to do with AI, which I think is really cool. Claude Cowork was a really big moment in that, where it's like: I have a folder of stuff, and I need that folder of stuff to be different in some material way. I need all these PNGs to be JPEGs, I need all these files to be in this consistent format, I need all this stuff to just be different in some way. It's the kind of thing that you could do manually, and it's actually not that hard to do manually, but it's super annoying and it's the kind of thing you just don't do. That is chef's-kiss perfect stuff to give to AI. I'm starting to see people do that more and more, and I think that's very cool.

What I have not seen is any enthusiasm for the idea of letting AI rule your life. There are things that AI is very good at. I've heard from a lot of people that one of the things they like to do is say, "Show me all the stuff in Slack and my email and my to-do list that I missed yesterday. Just show me some high-priority stuff." They're getting mixed results — those are great when they hit, and they're sort of useless when they don't, and that's fine. It's a relatively low-stress activity, so people get something out of it. But there are so many tools out there now that are like, "We are going to perfectly prioritize your time for you, we're going to base it around your energy levels — all you do is plug in the API keys for five apps you use and we'll take care of everything for you." There is just absolutely no evidence in my life, or anyone else's that I talk to, that any of that stuff works at all.

Newton: There's a phenomenon that seems to only happen on X.com, which is Silicon Valley folks giving very performative accounts of how they're using AI. I love to pick on Garry Tan, who runs Y Combinator — a very nice guy, but he's always tweeting about his "G stack" and how he's used AI to write 100,000 lines of code to run his entire life. What do you make of the folks who say, "No, no, no — I have the Mac mini in the closet, it is running my life, and this is the way of the future"?

Pierce: It's mostly productivity porn, right? I remember a few years ago when the Notion community really took off. Notion went from being this niche little productivity app to genuinely huge — a mainstream thing that lots of people knew. The Notion Reddit became completely overrun with people showing off these gorgeous, incredibly beautifully designed bespoke dashboards that accomplished nothing. They just accomplished nothing! It's so fun to make that stuff, and I totally get it. In the same way that I really like building myself elaborate new systems that don't make me any more productive, setting up a bunch of agents that feel like they're doing something feels great, and it's fun to do. It does not help you get anything else done.

A thing I have come to believe relatively recently is that there's a lot of basic day-to-day life-task stuff that is very helpful to offload to AI. It's the same as the Claude Cowork level of things to do: "I need to find a plumber." Just a real thing that happens all the time. I can go onto Nextdoor and Yelp and cross-reference all these different platforms to find a plumber. Or I can just go to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and say, "Can you find me a plumber that generally has pretty good reviews?" And they do a good job. There are a lot of tasks like that in our lives that are simple but time-consuming, and a lot of that is useful to offload as a way to run through your day-to-day life. But people are telling these stories about the agents they have managing their finances — don't do that! Just don't do that. If you're offloading your work priorities to AI and trusting that it will do a good job, it is going to fail you over and over and over again. It just will.

Newton: Here's where this gets a little edgier — some journalists would say, "I would absolut