My Week in AI: November 9 ⭐

Late last week, I wrote about a formal push on my part to incorporate AI into my work each day, and I occurred that this perhaps warrants a weekly check-in.

Here's what I've been working on since then
Markdown reference organization
I've been slowly publishing pre-release versions of chapters for my coming Markdown book to the site, but because this is a new book, it's likely I will need to change content or rearrange how the book is organized as I go. The biggest issue, I guess, is the set of three chapters that constitutes the reference section ("How") of the book. I published an early version of the first of those chapters back in mid-October, but I wasn't completely sure about the breakdown for each.

As it now stands, the three reference chapters are:

Common Markdown Syntax, which covers the most common Markdown syntax for writers specifically. In this case, "most common" means the Markdown syntax that any Markdown editor or flavor supports.
Advanced Markdown Syntax, which is maybe not the best name, but this one covers other widely used Markdown syntax (links, images, tables, etc.).
Features Missing From Markdown, which covers things that are not supported by Markdown like fonts, text color, embedded images, and so on, plus less common Markdown syntax whose support will vary by editor and Markdown flavor.

The first two of those are complete or at least complete adjacent, but I want to make sure that each chapter covers the correct content. And I've spent a lot of time combing through several references to make sure it's correctly organized. But then it occurred to me that this was a good job for AI to take on.

So I fired up Gemini, pointed it at the CommonMark specification, John Gruber's original design write-up, and other documentation. And then I prompted it with:
I'm writing a book about Markdown. One of the trickiest parts for the reference section is that there are many different Markdown flavors. So I would like to have separate chapters for Markdown that works everywhere (most likely mapping to the CommonMark flavor), Markdown that's not part of CommonMark but is still commonly found in many editors, and then advanced Markdown, which is everything else. Looking at these references, can you list the Markdown syntax that should appear in each of those chapters?
As expected, it spit out a nice report-style answer that neatly divided the content into the three chapters.

So I compared that to how I had organized my book and made some minor changes here and there (basically, moving content from one chapter to another). I had to remind myself of the "for writers" bit, which is important, as that's the focus of the book, so my organization doesn't map exactly to Gemini's recommendations. But I was happy to see that I hadn't left out anything important too.
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