How AI Is Revolutionizing My Workflow as a Data Scientist
Over the last couple of years, AI has completely reshaped the way I code, document, organize my work, and even challenged how I think. Here’s some ways AI is transforming my day (and yes, I do use AI pretty much all day).
AI Helps Me Code More Efficiently
My job has always required that I code. I am primarily using R and Python. While I am comfortable writing both of these languages (and less comfortable with a bunch of others), my day has ALWAYS required that I look things up.
Bug fixes are now effortless
Instead of Googling errors, I now use a chatbot to help me solve them. The difference: instead of looking at stack overflow pages at something similar to mine and tweaking that solution to my situation, I just get the solution (ok ok ok… sometimes it isn’t perfect, but it is always directly applicable to what I am working with). This saves time AND mental space.
Documentation happens automatically
Show of hands, who has ever written a README proactively. If you raised your hand, you’re lying or confused about what proactively means. How about commenting your code? Na… me neither. It is so hard to find the mental space to comment the code after going through about 47 iterations to get it right in the first place. AI does this for me, now. And it is good. Like really good. The best README I’ve ever created sans AI was half hearted at best. Now I get fully documented code and repositories. As a consultant, I feel like this is a huge all-star unlock. The code I am writing on behalf of my client looks good, is readable, and someone else can pick it up and work on it one day.
Sometimes, it even writes my code
GASP. I know… I know… sometimes, I just let the AI code for me. Don’t tell anyone, but this website? It’s written by Claude. The other day, I created a whole dockerized application that pulled data from a Snowflake table, loaded it into an Elastic Search cluster, and allowed me to create dashboards on top of it in Kibana. Oh… this took me an afternoon. In an afternoon, I started the project and presented it to my client (I know, I’m impressed with me, too).
AI Keeps Me Organized
Because I am a better coder with AI, I am also more organized. Let me explain…
Automatic meeting summaries
For one, I built a meeting summarizer. Anyone who has tried Granola or Google Gemini’s summary knows they are not good (to be kind). To overcome this, I built a python script that is monitoring a Google Drive folder for new meeting transcripts. All I need to do is turn on transcription for a meeting - when the transcript is ready, my script grabs the details, sends them to ChatGPT with a standardized prompt, and turns them into a markdown document for me to put in my Obsidian notes.
Personal productivity tracking
I am working on taking this a step further and have the script also summarize my day, week, month, quarter, and year. I am going to have it include meeting notes, other notes, code that I’ve written, meetings that I’ve attended but not noted, books I’ve read (hello, Goodreads), workouts I’ve done (thank you Whoop and Strava), podcasts I’ve listened to…
AI Broadens My Perspectives
For a number of reasons, I’ve recently realized that I live in a bubble. Not everyone listens, reads, does the same things I do, but a lot of the information I get makes it seem like they do. I’ve recently started having AI summarize the podcasts I listen to AND then provide alternative viewpoints (whisper does speech-to-text and then ChatGPT does the summary). What am I missing here? Without changing my routine much at all, I now feel as though my awareness has increased.
AI is radically enhancing my productivity, organization, and even how I think. But I know this is just scratching the surface. I’d love to hear your experiences - how are you leveraging AI in your daily life?