How to use AI Coding tools for more than Coding

AI can do so much these days.
And yet, most of us are still using it only via ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

But what, if I tell you that AI Coding tools are often much better than the generic AI tools to help you with your tasks?

Why AI Coding Tools are Better for Using AI for your projects

There is one main reason, why AI Coding tools are better:
They give you the ability to have all your data, your past writings, your project data in one place and the AI Coding tool can directly access it.

That makes it so much easier to have all the relevant data in one place than copy-pasting everything manually into the AI Chat Tools.

AI Chat Tools - yes - they can connect with your computer files too, they can connect with databases and co, but from my experience, they are not coming close to those AI Coders, that are trained to keep context and focus at the problem at hand.

So for what can you use an AI Coder now?

Here are some examples for what I used an AI Coder that are NOT coding tasks:

Write Commission Plans for Sales and Customer Success Teams
Write Plans in General and adapt until you find the right way of how to handle and execute them
Turn presentation slides in various formats like HTML, SVG, PNG into one aligned PDF
Write Content posts and collect them all in one place with faster access to them to run analyses
Created a complex financial-legal case for a client combining various databases, documents and insights into one cohesive report

and so much more...

Try it out and see for yourself.
Here is a short guide on how you can get started yourself.

How to use Cursor to do Non-Coding Work with AI more Effectively

I use Cursor heavily, so I will share the work I do with Cursor. But other AI Coding tools will likely be similarly effective.

In the end, they are built on top of AI Models an thus use them under the hood for their work.

Download Cursor and describe to the AI agent your plan and what you want to achieve. "Hey, I want to build an account plan for my clients for the next quarter. Goal should be to determine what I need to do to get to $x in upsell and keep my retention at 95%. Please help me to lay out what we need to create that and collaborate together to build out that plan."
Then wait for the agents answer and then like as if you would talk with a team colleague in written form add all the relevant data. As Cursor lives in your desktop, you can add various files in there, so that Cursor can connect the dots for you.
I am always a bit careful with very personal data and anonymize it a bit, but in general put my data in there and let it connect the dots for me a la : "Here is that table with my clients in file A, where you see the revenue per client, then here in file B are the logs and most relevant information about that client from the last year, and then in file C are my plans and targets. Please put together a visual SWOT analysis of my clients as well as share with me on which clients you would focus on in Q1 and why?"
Then, let the AI Agent do it work. Once its done, review it critically and ask for all the relevant changes to align the plan with your own context, that you did not share with the AI Agent. This step is critical. Don't make the mistake of thinking: "Oh, it does not work, that is totally off" and then leave. After all, the AI agent helps you with your work, it's not a magic wand. And it often gets much better after some iterations with you, not on the first shot.
Keep going, adapting, improving till you are happy with your plan. Then copy/paste it to a document, ask the AI Agent to transform it to a PDF file or connect it to another tool (advanced) where you are directly pushing it to the right fields in i.e. a Customer Success tool, Hubspot or Salesforce.
Voila, you are done and your plan is ready. Congratulations!