Welcome to Wired on AI 👋
Hey there —
Welcome to the very first issue of Wired on AI — a weekly newsletter for people who want to cut through the AI hype and actually use these tools to get more done.
Every week I'll cover:
One tool worth your time (and what to actually do with it)
Quick hits — 3–5 new tools or updates you should know about
A prompt you can steal and use today
No fluff. No "AI is changing everything!" breathlessness. Just useful stuff.
Let's get into it.
🛠️ Tool of the Week: Claude by Anthropic
What it is: An AI assistant from Anthropic — one of the few that can genuinely reason through complex problems, write long-form content without losing the thread, and hold context across a long conversation.
Why it's worth your time right now:
Most people treat AI assistants like a search engine — ask a quick question, get a quick answer. That's leaving 90% of the value on the table.
Where Claude actually shines:
Long document analysis — paste in a 20-page report and ask it to pull out the key decisions and action items
Drafting with nuance — give it your bullet points, your tone, and your audience, and it'll write something that actually sounds like you
Thinking partner — use it to stress-test an idea before you commit ("What are the three biggest weaknesses in this plan?")
Best use case to try today: Open Claude (free at claude.ai) and paste in the last email chain you've been dreading replying to. Tell it: "Here's an email thread. Draft a professional, friendly reply that [your goal]. Keep it under 150 words."
You'll have a great draft in 20 seconds.
Pricing: Free tier available. Claude Pro is $20/month. Affiliate link: claude.ai
⚡ Quick Hits
1. Perplexity AI just added "Deep Research" to its free tier Perplexity's research mode — which previously required a paid plan — now does multi-step web research and synthesizes sources into a full report. Genuinely useful for competitive research or background reading. Try it at perplexity.ai.
2. Notion AI upgraded its summarization If you use Notion, their built-in AI now does much better at summarizing long documents and meeting notes. Worth turning on if you haven't — it's baked into your existing Notion subscription.
3. Gamma.app — AI presentations in 2 minutes Describe what you want in plain English, and Gamma builds a beautiful slide deck. The free tier gives you 10 AI-generated presentations. Way faster than PowerPoint for internal decks.
4. ElevenLabs free tier expanded Text-to-speech that actually sounds human. Great for turning your written content into audio. The free tier now includes 10,000 characters/month — enough to convert a newsletter issue into a podcast episode.
5. ChatGPT's "Projects" feature is underutilized If you're on ChatGPT free or Plus, the Projects feature lets you give the AI permanent context — your job title, how you like to communicate, what you're working on. Set it up once and every conversation starts smarter. Settings → Personalization → Custom Instructions.
🎯 Prompt of the Week
The "Second Brain Summarizer"
Use this whenever you have a long article, report, or document you need to understand fast:
I'm going to paste in a document. Please:
1. Give me a 3-sentence summary of the main point
2. List the 5 most important facts or findings
3. Tell me the single most actionable takeaway
4. Flag anything that seems uncertain, speculative, or that I should verify
Here's the document:
[paste your content here]I use a version of this every day. Works on research papers, earnings reports, long emails, meeting transcripts — anything.
Before You Go
Thanks for being one of the founding readers of Wired on AI. I'm building this for people who want the practical signal, not the noise.
If you found this useful, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person who'd get value from it. That's how we grow.
And if you want to go deeper — I just put together The AI Prompt Power Pack: 100+ tested prompts organized by use case (writing, research, business, coding, and more). It's everything I actually use, in one place.
See you next week, Scott Wired on AI