Where Should You Use The Magic Thinking Rock

Welcome back to the third entry of the Rock Whisperer guide! The series where we try to make sense of the shiniest, most overhyped and somehow still underrated rock in human history. Last time, we covered when you should use the magic thinking rock, which you can catch up on here. And this time, it really has only been a couple of weeks. I’m as shocked as you are. This edition covers the where: where the rock belongs at work, where it belongs at home, and where it should never, ever be allowed to go.

The Backstory

In the first entry of this series, I mentioned having to explain to my mom that, no, the video of a world leader rapping isn’t real. That was the easy part.

The hard part came a few months later, when my mom discovered the rock herself.

At first it was cute. She asked it for a recipe. Then for tips on why her tomatoes were splitting. Then she had it write a very passive-aggressive message to the neighbour about his dog (the message was, I must admit, excellent). I was proud. My little mom, all grown up, whispering to rocks.

Then one Sunday she calls me and says, very casually: “Oh, and I asked the AI about my blood test results, and it says it’s probably nothing, so I’m not going to bother the doctor.”

Reader, I have never driven to my parents’ house faster.

Everything was fine, for the record. Her doctor confirmed it was, in fact, probably nothing. But it got me thinking. My mom isn’t doing anything wrong by using the rock. She just has no idea where it belongs. And honestly? Neither do most companies I talk to. Same confusion, bigger budgets.

Why This Happens

When it comes to the rock, people tend to fall into one of two camps.

Camp one: the rock goes everywhere. “We’re an AI-first company now.” Every meeting gets a summary nobody reads, every email gets written by the rock and read by another rock, and somewhere a chatbot is confidently offering customers a 90% discount. These are the people who bought a hammer and are now very excited about everything in the house, including the TV.

Camp two: the rock goes nowhere. “It’s a fad, like NFTs and the metaverse.” These people are going to be very surprised in about two years, when the person in the next desk is doing their job in half the time.

Both camps are wrong, and they’re wrong for the same reason. They’re asking “should we use AI?” instead of “where does AI actually help?”

In the last entry, we built a test for exactly that: how well do you know the task, and how bad is it if the rock gets it wrong? This time, we’re taking that test out into the real world and applying it, room by room, at the office and at home.

What This Article Aims to Do

This is not a “100 AI TOOLS YOU NEED IN 2026” post. By the time I hit publish, half of those tools would have pivoted, been acquired, or quietly died. RIP to every “ChatGPT for X” startup from 2023.

What I want to do is walk you through the rooms of the house, the office and the home, and show you where the rock earns its keep and where it’s a liability. We’ll reuse the same four zones from the last post, so if you read it, congratulations, you get two posts for the price of one. If you didn’t, it’s linked above. I’ll wait. My boss will appreciate the extra page view. (The raise. Still pending. You know what to do.)

At the end, there’s a Rock Map. Same deal as the decision matrix: screenshot it, share it, tape it to the fridge next to your mom’s blood test results.

Part One: The Rock at Work

Let’s start with the office, where the stakes are higher, the budgets are bigger, and the coffee is worse.

#1 – Marketing & content

The department that adopted the rock first, and loudest.

The rock is genuinely great at the blank page problem. First drafts, ten headline variations, turning one webinar into five social posts and a newsletter, rewriting the same product description for three different audiences. Stuff that used to eat an entire afternoon now takes a coffee break.

Where it goes wrong is when nobody with taste is looking. You’ve seen the results. Every LinkedIn post starts with a one-line hook, followed by a dramatic line break, followed by “Here’s what nobody tells you:”. The rock has a voice, and if you don’t replace it with yours, it’ll replace yours with it.

And yes, I’m aware of the irony of a guy who couldn’t get the rock to write blog posts telling you how to get the rock to write content. Character development, folks.

Zone: Rock as intern. The rock drafts, a human with taste edits, and nothing goes out without someone reading it first.

#2 – Development

My home turf, and, I’ll say it, the room where the rock is happiest.

There’s a simple reason for that: code is checkable. It either compiles or it doesn’t. The tests either pass or they don’t. Unlike a blog post or a techno song, there’s no “vibes” involved (well, except for vibe coding, but we don’t talk about that at family dinners).

Coding agents, code reviews, writing tests nobody wanted to write, documentation nobody wanted to write, migrating that one legacy service nobody wanted to touch. All prime rock territory. I’d estimate the rock writes a solid chunk of my boilerplate these days, and the only thing I miss is the excuse to put on headphones and ignore everyone for four hours.

The catch is the same one from the last post. A senior developer with a coding agent is a superhero. A non-developer with a coding agent is someone who just shipped an app that stores passwords in a spreadsheet called passwords_final_FINAL.xlsx.

Zone: Let it rip, if you can read the code. Rock as intern for anything going to production.

#3 – Customer support & sales

The room where the rock talks to people who aren’t you. Which is exactly why you need to be careful.

Used well, the rock is fantastic here. Sorting incoming tickets by urgency, drafting replies for a human to approve, answering “what are your opening hours” for the 400th time at 3 AM without a single sigh, summarising a sales call into CRM notes before you’ve even hung up. Your support team gets to spend their time on the hard tickets, and your sales team gets to spend their time actually selling instead of updating spreadsheets.

Used badly, the rock starts making promises. A Canadian airline found this out the expensive way, when its chatbot invented a refund policy that didn’t exist, a customer relied on it, and a tribunal decided that yes, the airline is responsible for what its own chatbot says. Turns out “the rock said it, not us” doesn’t hold up in court. Who knew.

Rule of thumb: the rock can route, sort, summarise and draft all day long. The moment it’s about to commit your company to something (a price, a refund, a deadline, a discount), a human needs to be in the loop.

Zone: Rock as intern. Draft and route, never promise.

#4 – Finance, legal & HR

The serious rooms. The ones with signatures, audits and consequences.

There’s real value here, don’t get me wrong. Pulling numbers out of 300 invoices in different formats. Summarising a 60-page contract so you know which 5 pages to actually read. Drafting a first version of the remote work policy. Answering “how many vacation days do I have left” so HR doesn’t have to, for the 50th time this month.

But notice the pattern: extracting, summarising, drafting. Never deciding. The rock doesn’t sign the tax return. The rock doesn’t approve the contract. And the rock most definitely doesn’t decide who gets hired or fired. That last one isn’t just my opinion, by the way. Under the EU AI Act, AI used in hiring and managing employees is classified as high-risk, with a whole list of obligations attached. We wrote a whole post on that one, if you’re into regulatory thrillers.

Zone: Rock as intern for the paperwork. Leave it in the garden for anything that decides about people.

#5 – Operations & the boring stuff

The unsung hero of the office, and probably the rock’s single best room.

Meeting notes. Weekly reports. Onboarding guides. That internal wiki page last updated by someone who left the company in 2021. Turning a 45-minute call into five action items with names next to them. Nobody went to university dreaming of doing any of this, and yet it eats a terrifying chunk of everyone’s week.

This is the “repetition is the rock’s love language” zone from the last post, in its natural habitat. You know exactly what a good weekly report looks like, you’ve written 200 of them. So write the skill once, put it behind a harness, maybe hook it up to an agent gateway, and the report lands in your inbox every Friday before you’ve finished your coffee.

It’s not glamorous. It won’t get you a keynote slot at a tech conference. But if you want the rock to actually give you hours back in your week, this is where the hours are hiding.

Zone: Let it rip.

Part Two: The Rock at Home

Now for the place where there’s no IT department, no compliance team, and no one to stop you except your own common sense. And, apparently, me, speeding down the highway on a Sunday.

#6 – Learning anything

If I could only keep the rock for one thing in my personal life, it would be this.

The rock is the most patient tutor in human history. It will explain the same concept twelve times, in twelve different ways, at 1 AM, without once sighing or checking its watch. Learning a language? Practise conversations with it. Kid’s maths homework has changed since you were in school and you’re too proud to admit you don’t get it? Have the rock explain it to you first, then explain it to your kid like you knew all along. I won’t tell.

And here’s where my techno song finally gets its redemption arc. The rock couldn’t make a decent techno track for me, because I knew nothing. But it’s genuinely great at teaching me what a sidechain is, why the kick drum matters, and what my friend meant by “rolling bassline”. Learn first, create later. That’s how you climb out of the zero.

One tip: ask it to quiz you, not just explain. Explanations feel like learning. Being quizzed actually is learning.

Zone: Rock as tutor. The best one you’ll never have to pay by the hour.

#7 – Life admin

The adulting room. The stuff nobody warned you about when you were a kid dreaming of being a grown-up who can eat ice cream for dinner.

Planning a 5-day trip with a budget and a toddler. Comparing three phone contracts written by lawyers whose sole purpose is to make them incomparable. Decoding a letter from the tax office that is technically written in your native language but might as well be in Klingon. Building a weekly meal plan around whatever sad vegetables are left in the fridge. And yes, the workout program from the first post. Still holds up, still haven’t followed it, not the rock’s fault.

Why is this a great room for the rock? Because it passes the intern test with flying colours. It’s low stakes (the worst case is a slightly worse itinerary), and it’s checkable (you can look up the flight, read the contract clause, open the fridge).

The only rule: double-check anything with a date, a price or a deadline on it. The rock is great at planning, and less great at knowing that the museum is closed on Mondays.

Zone: Let it rip.

#8 – Health & money

Which brings us back to my mom, and the fastest drive of my life.

The rock is actually pretty useful here, just not in the way most people use it. It’s great for understanding what the words on your lab results mean. It’s great for preparing a list of questions before you see your doctor, so you don’t walk out of the appointment and remember the one thing you meant to ask. Same for money. It can explain what an index fund is, what that line on your payslip means, or how compound interest works, without making you feel stupid for asking.

What it shouldn’t be is the final word. The rock can’t examine you. It doesn’t know your history unless you tell it, and it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. And with money, it doesn’t carry any responsibility for the advice it gives you. If the rock tells you to put your savings into something and it goes to zero, the rock will apologise very politely and then forget the conversation ever happened.

Use the rock to walk into the doctor’s or the accountant’s office smarter. Don’t use it to skip the visit.

Zone: Rock as tutor. Prep the questions, keep the professionals.

#9 – Hobbies & creativity

A philosophical question for you: if the rock does your hobby for you, is it still your hobby?

I’d argue no. If you love painting and the rock paints the picture, you don’t have a hobby, you have a printer. If you love writing short stories and the rock writes them, congratulations, you’re now an editor, which, speaking as someone who has edited rock output for this very post, is a lot less fun.

The trick is to use the rock as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. Ask it to critique your drawing. Ask it why your sourdough came out flat as a pancake. Have it play the dungeon master for your D&D campaign prep, then throw out half its ideas because yours are better. Ask it to suggest three chord progressions, then play them yourself and pick the one that makes you feel something.

The joy of a hobby is in the doing. Let the rock help you do it better, not do it instead of you.

Zone: Rock as tutor. Sparring partner, not ghostwriter.

#10 – Relationships

This one’s going to be short, because the answer is short.

The rock does not write your partner’s birthday card. The rock does not write your wedding vows. The rock does not write the apology text after you forgot your anniversary (which, ironically, the rock could have reminded you about, if you’d set up that agent gateway from the first post).

And for the love of all that is holy, the rock does not write your dating app messages. Somewhere out there, two people have been flirting through two different chatbots for three weeks, and when they finally meet in person, it’s going to be the most awkward coffee in human history.

The people in your life don’t want the best possible words. They want your words. Clumsy, misspelled, too long, whatever. That’s the whole point.

Can you ask the rock for gift ideas? Sure. Can you ask it how to approach a difficult conversation? Absolutely, that’s tutor territory. But when it’s time to actually say the thing, the rock stays in the garden, and you do the talking.

Zone: Leave it in the garden.

The Rock Map

The bit you actually scrolled down for. Again. I see you. Again.

Every room from this post, sorted into the same four zones as last time’s decision matrix. Green means let it rip, red means leave it in the garden, and everything in between needs a human somewhere in the loop.

Notice how most of the map sits in the middle? That’s the point. The rock almost never works completely alone, and it almost never needs to be locked out completely. Most of the time, it’s a very fast assistant sitting next to someone who knows what they’re doing. Which, if you’ve read the disclaimer up top, should be you.

Conclusion

So, where should the magic thinking rock go?

Not everywhere, and not nowhere. It goes where the work is repetitive, checkable and something you already understand. It goes into the boring corners of the office where the hours are hiding, and into your evenings as the most patient tutor you’ve ever had. And it stays out of the rooms where someone has to sign, diagnose, decide about people, or say “I love you”.

My mom, for the record, still uses the rock every day. Recipes, tomatoes, the occasional strongly worded letter to the neighbour. But now she sends the blood test results to her doctor first, and to me second. Progress.

Next time on the Rock Whisperer guide: the who. Who should be holding the rock, who’s responsible when it gets things wrong, and whether it’s coming for your job. Spoiler: it’s complicated. Until then, the raise. Share the post. My boss still reads the analytics. Pls and thank you.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Third time’s the charm.