AI in Practice, No Fluff — Day 10/10 Last week I needed to generate cover images for a blog series. Ten posts, two sizes each. I opened an AI design tool, described what I wanted, and waited. The results were unusable. Garbled text, wrong colors, layouts that ignored every parameter I gave it. I spent an hour trying different prompts, adjusting descriptions, regenerating. Nothing worked. Then I wrote an HTML template. Loaded our exact fonts, plugged in the hex colors, added a CSS gradient. Rendered 20 images in under a minute. Every one was exactly right on the first pass. That is the moment this post is about. Not the failure of AI image generation (it will get better), but the instinct to reach for AI when a simpler tool would have worked from the start. The first series was about which AI to use. This one taught how to use it well. Today is about when not to use it at all. The hammer problem This series has spent nine days teaching you techniques. Few-shot prompting. Chain-of-thought reasoning.…