Gene and I spent the first half hour of episode 182 talking AI, and I figured it was worth writing down where I’ve landed, at least for now. Short version: AI is the most useful tool I’ve picked up in years, and I still won’t give it a single password.
Here’s what I use it for. I finally have my first truly recurring task running on my Grok bot. Every Monday it goes out and hunts down RFPs related to my business. It pulls the opportunity, the issuing entity, the title, the date it was posted, the date it’s due, scope notes, and whether it’s open or limited. All of it lands in a nice spreadsheet.
The interesting part is how the work is split. Grok only handles the internet-facing stuff, the scraping. It hands what it finds to a local Qwen model on my own hardware through an MCP bridge, and the local model does the analysis, summarizing, and formatting. I could have Grok do the whole thing. However, I already own the hardware, it’s cheaper, and getting the two to work together was an experiment. Now I have a sales resource.
Note: Grok has none of my passwords and it never will. I’m not logging Grok or any other AI into my Servers to troubleshoot. I’ll ask it for troubleshooting steps and do the work myself.
Executive are bragging that their AI reads their email, sets up their meetings, runs their computer, and manages their bank account. That’s nuts! If you read [my post on the water systems](https://namedben.com/water-systems-hit-across-at-least-7-states/), it’s the same lesson. Don’t leave the keys sitting out where anything can grab them.
And yes, even a locked-down bot can bite you. Gene set his AI up on Signal so it would only listen to him. So of course I started sending it SQL injection, drop table commands, the usual. Gene replied to me, quoting my command back to tell me it wasn’t going to work… and the bot answered, because now the command came from the one guy it listens to I’m reminded of the Warren G. Harding quote: his enemies he could handle, it was his friends that kept him up at night.
Which brings me to my rule: you can’t ask it about something you don’t already know enough about. Well, you can, you just won’t know if the answer is right.
So : 1) let it do the grunt work,
2) verify everything it hands you,
3) never hand it credentials.
And Yes I used Grok to write this post but hey I edited it!
The whole conversation is in episode 182, “When Machines Can Copy Software From A Screenshot.” [Give it a listen](https://podcastindexrobot.com/open/5770690/61136724489).
More episodes at [justtwogoodoldboys.com](http://justtwogoodoldboys.com).