What gets done on a walk with an AI assistant?

On a roughly 15-minute walk, Elena Voss talked an AI assistant through a roadmap update. She came home with an outline instead of a blank page. She estimated it saved her 10 or 15 minutes at her computer, though she still had to check dates and status and revise the wording before sending it.

Jeff Tannenbaum said he has talked through product ideas on walks and had an AI assistant write a spec — a document describing what to build. “I wanted to reread the spec, make sure it actually made good sense. It's harder to do on mobile.” Coding, too, waited until he was back at his computer.

The walks felt different to them. Tannenbaum said he looks forward to the talks because they help him organize his thoughts before work. Voss found hers less restful: “I wasn’t looking at a screen, which helped, but I was still working—just narrating the work to my phone.”

Lila Chen has never used an AI assistant for work on a walk. She keeps that time free of work and said she comes back less tangled up in her problems, even if the walk solves nothing. “If an idea sticks, I’ll jot it down when I get home.”

For Voss, the outline was useful, but it was not the update itself. “The walk got me a draft. The screen was where it became something I could send.”