About

This blog is here to show me, and anyone else, how to work with AI in the most practical way there is. No fluff, and more than headlines. Like a good friend who says: come sit next to me and watch what I do.

Hi, I’m Seffy Fisher.

I grew up in Herzliya, Israel, in an ultra-Orthodox Chabad family. (Chabad is a Hasidic movement, famous for sending emissaries all over the world. Hold that thought.)

At age 3, in cheder, the traditional Jewish kindergarten, I licked a page of letters. Today I get that this is where my love for letters, words and language started.

I’ve been reading ever since, my whole life.

To me, the ideal way to learn is with books. That’s how I learned almost everything I know.

Books were the most patient teachers I ever had. You can go back to them again and again, at your own pace.

Doing everything myself

The thing that stood out most about me, from childhood, was doing everything myself and teaching myself.

On Shabbat I obviously wasn’t allowed to touch the computer, and our Pentium 4 had a little light on the case that came on when the computer was running. That light would give me away.

So I taught myself to change that through the BIOS, so the light wouldn’t come on, and my mom wouldn’t see me fiddling with the computer on Shabbat, God forbid.

At 16, I was already teaching computer classes at a summer camp.

After that, I organized the warehouse of an online bike shop. The owner was a software developer who built his store himself, way back in 2002, when e-commerce in Israel was still in diapers.

One day his wife told him to get rid of all his programming books, or he’d be out on the street along with them. He brought them all to me.

That’s how I learned. I read programming books like novels.

Books and computers, together again.

Despite what people think, my Hasidic upbringing gave me curiosity. Not accepting things as they are. Being a rebel, and restless.

The religious practice, the clothing and the look, I left behind. But the language and the Jewish and Hasidic folklore stayed with me. They’re woven into everything I say, to the shluchim too.

You see it most in the names I chose. Shluchim, Hebrew for “emissaries”, from Chabad’s shlichus, the mission of sending emissaries out into the world. And the blog’s stories are “maasiyos”, tales, like the tales of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

Shinlamed is named after the Hebrew letters shin and lamed. Basher, from “ba’asher hu sham”, “where he is”, a biblical phrase about meeting someone exactly where they are. Shlomby, from “shalom bayit”, peace at home. And Hiba, from “hav”, Aramaic for “give”.

In the Talmud, in tractate Kiddushin, they ask how we know that “a person’s emissary is like himself”. Meaning what the emissary does for you counts as if you did it yourself. (And more than that, the responsibility is yours, not the emissary’s. The old saying is “don’t kill the messenger”. In our case, kill the person who sent him.)

Only now, after all these years, did that line pop into my head in this context. To me that’s exactly what the shluchim do. They extend what I can do, and they help a lot like people do.

That’s why they’re shluchim, and not agents or bots. At least, that’s where I landed in my search for the right Hebrew name for the new digital helpers in our lives.

In Kfar Yuval

There was a stage when I just couldn’t find myself in life at all.

I went up north, to Kfar Yuval, a small village near Israel’s northern border. I wanted to see if I’d have a eureka moment about what to do next.

When I came back to the center of the country, I realized something simple. All I’d done there was read books all day. First all the books in the house I stayed in, then from a secondhand shop in Metula.

So I told myself: go work with books.

I sent my CV to Steimatzky and to HaNasich HaKatan (Israeli bookstore chains) for a sales job in one of their stores.

The only ones who got back to me were e-vrit (עברית), an Israeli e-book and audiobook company. I had no idea what they did or how it worked.

Shluchim

I tried tons of things with AI. Codex, Claude Code, Instinct, Gemini, Copilot, and even Manus inside Telegram.

There were tasks I kept trying the same way for months. None of them really worked, at least not right away. Only after tons of messages.

And then came Grok Bot. It took me a few weeks just to decide to download it, never mind paying Elon Musk. Suddenly it felt possible to humanize them, and start getting real work done.

Each shaliach has its own purpose. And the experience is as simple as WhatsApp. Something in how it was built was completely different. The whole organizing idea was different.

Today, if I need something, I just send a message. It’s way more meaningful than any other experience I’ve had.

What still doesn’t work?

To be clear, it’s not magic.

The quality is sometimes not good enough. Big tasks are still hard.

Code needs to be checked again and again. You can’t just ask and trust it’ll ship at high quality.

There are limits that my workplace and its IT put in place. There are all the worries and complications of information security. And there’s a gap between what I can imagine, what I can make and the time I have. I have more ideas than I have hours and tokens.

I write about all of this here, without sugarcoating.

Who’s it for?

First of all for me, honestly. I wanted a place to document my processes.

And then for anyone curious about how to really work with AI day to day, in personal life and at work.

Like when you ask your best friend, “Tell me, how exactly do you do that?”, and he says, “Come sit next to me, I’ll just show you.”

Don’t be a stinker

If something here touched you, if you want to work together or just talk, or give feedback on the blog, I’d love to hear from you.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is just sit next to each other. Especially in a world that’s starting to fill up with more shluchim than people.

You can find me here:

• Instagram: shinlamed
• Facebook: shinlamed
• Email: [email protected]

I’m the guy who works with the shluchim. In this case, the Rebbe of the shluchim :) (The Rebbe is the leader of a Hasidic movement. The Lubavitcher Rebbe is the one who sent Chabad’s shluchim around the world.)

Credits