𝐈’𝐯𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐚𝐲 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐌𝐲 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞

One of the things I’ve been doing with AI lately is generating process diagrams. Flowcharts that explain how our software actually works, step by step. And the results have been nothing short of jaw-dropping. Our customers are eating them up. And rightly so. A well-drawn flowchart does in ten seconds what a thirty-minute call sometimes can’t.

Which takes me back. Way back.

Engineering school. Two full semesters of Engineering Drawing. I remember my classmates griping endlessly – two semesters! For drawing! It was tedious, but I loved it. Those were the days when the mini-drafter had just ousted the T-square and calculators had ousted the slide rule. We thought we were high tech! Our professor drummed something into us that I’ve never forgotten: drawings are a language. A precise, universal language that communicates things words simply cannot. We had to learn it to communicate our design ideas. A picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s worth ten thousand! How true that turned out to be.

I carried that with me into my career. Visio, Lucid, every drawing tool out there. I used them all. And they worked. Eventually. But lord, were they painful. Hours of dragging boxes and arrows around. Either I had to carve out serious time to do it myself, or I had to pay someone else to do it AND somehow telepathically transfer everything in my head into theirs. You know how that goes.

And now? I write a brief, just plain English, a paragraph or two, hand it to Claude, and viola…a technically correct, clean, logical flowchart comes back on the first try. Instant gratification. Love it. Then a couple hours of back and forth refining it and I’ve got something I’d have spent days on before. And it’s better. Not just better, it is beautiful. I even set up a style guide (thanks for the tip Blair Robert) to automate a consistent look for all our flowcharts. For the first time I can speak the language freely. No more slowing down, no more friction between the idea in my head and the diagram on the screen.

I taught my team at ShowCycle and they are having a ball. Our customers love the diagrams. My engineering professor (R.I.P.) would approve.

Fast forward to today. AI replaces drafters and unfortunately the traditional draftsmen and brings us huge efficiency. But thinking remains in the domain of humans. And if draftsmen can dump their tools for AI, we all have a win.

This stuff is real and amazing. If you have any experiences or tips to share, I would love to hear from you.