I needed a banner image yesterday.
Nothing fancy. Just a clean header for a blog post. My instinct said: open an AI image generator, write a prompt, iterate a few times, settle for something close enough.
Instead I paused. Searched for five minutes. Found a completely different approach.
Turns out I could write HTML and CSS, render it in a browser, and screenshot the result. Clean text. Exact colors. No weird AI artifacts. The method wasn’t obvious a month ago. Today it worked better than any image generator.
Five minutes of searching saved me an hour. And gave me a better result.
Workflows expire fast
AI tools change constantly. The best way to do something in January might be outdated by March.
Think about coding assistants alone. Two years ago, Copilot was the obvious choice. Then Cursor showed up and changed the game. Then Claude Code. Then Codex relaunched as something entirely different. Each shift changed how you’d actually work.
If you learned your AI workflow six months ago and never looked again, it might already be the slow way.
The invisible cost
Most people don’t realize they’re falling behind. They built a workflow, it works, they stick with it. Makes sense. Why change what isn’t broken?
Because it is broken. You just can’t see it. You spend ten minutes on a task that now takes two. You get OK output when great is possible. You’ve stopped noticing the friction because you stopped looking.
None of it feels urgent. That’s exactly the problem.
The five minute check
Here’s the simple habit. Before any task that uses AI tools, spend five minutes searching. Not deep research. Just a quick check: “What’s the best way to do X right now?”
Sometimes nothing changed. Fine. Five minutes gone. But sometimes the answer rewrites your whole approach. Those moments stack up.
The trick is adding “right now” or a date to your search. It filters out the old guides that still rank on page one but teach yesterday’s method.
Stay a beginner
There’s a Zen concept called Shoshin. Beginner’s mind. The idea is simple: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.
When tools change this fast, the person who says “let me look it up” beats the person who says “I already know how to do this.” Every time.
You don’t need to chase every new tool. You don’t need to be anxious about falling behind. Just check before you start.
Something probably changed.
Call to Action
Send this prompt to your AI:
“What’s the best way to [your task] right now, in 2026? Compare at least 3 current approaches. Include any methods that emerged in the last 3 months.”
You might find out you’ve been doing it the slow way. Or you’ll confirm your approach still holds. Either way, five minutes well spent.