Journal
Becoming attuned: early lessons in the Human-AI partnership.
I recently took a side quest in my "AI Mastery Project" to build a Project Management system in Notion with ChatGPT’s help. That taught me so much about promptcraft, I turned the postmortem into a blog post.
However, the experience sparked several insights about another subject that warrants a deeper examination: the Human–AI partnership.
After wrestling with this subject, I believe I'll still be writing about it long after I've mastered promptcraft. If we assume AI will be a permanent part of our future at work, then we'll have to get skilled at directing, and working with, non-human partners.
When ChatGPT tells you Claude’s a better writer, you listen.
Ever since I started using Claude and ChatGPT, I've been fascinated by their differences. I use ChatGPT to organize my life, to build systems, to give advice, for prompt engineering -- my left-brain work.
But I always sensed Claude was the more sensitive writer. As one friend commented a few months back, "The ghost in Claude's machine feels more human."
Creating my Notion HQ, step by step: a case study in real-time promptcraft.
I've been using ChatGPT and Claude for over a year, getting decent results from my prompts. But "getting decent results" isn't the same as "knowing what I'm doing."
It's like my golf game. Yes, I can drive a ball 220 yards down the fairway — one time out of five. The rest? Worm-burners and slices. There's a difference between getting lucky and succeeding consistently.
I want my promptcraft to be consistent.
The mistake that got my new project on the right track.
A couple weeks ago, I kicked off a big project – master the AI tools reshaping the creative landscape. I’d written a V2MOM (Salesforce-speak for “master plan”). I’d built a lesson plan for week one. I had dozens of ideas for blog posts and plans to catch up with dozens of people.
And I didn’t know where to start. I was paralyzed.
Half-measures are for half-careers: making my sabbatical all about generative AI
A couple weeks ago, I announced I'm taking a sabbatical.
The only thing left to do was figure out how to use all that free time productively.
The answer has been staring me in the face: Learn how to use AI creative tools like a ninja. And design the course myself.
This DIY approach will either be brilliant or spectacularly inefficient. Either way, beats binge-watching Netflix.
The human case for being nice to robots
Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled: “AI Doesn’t Care if You’re Polite to It. You Should Be Anyway.” It’s a great, quick, provocative read.
How do I feel about it? A frequent segment on “Real Time” with Bill Maher sums it up: “I don’t know it for a fact; I just know it’s true.”