Working with AI
Prompting, memory, and getting real work out of the model, including knowing when not to trust it.
Showing 21–40 of 98 posts
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Stop Guessing Whether AI Is Coming for Your Job. Ask the Data.
Anthropic made its Economic Index queryable in plain language inside Claude. The anxious question about your own field is now a research task.
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Tell AI What You Want and Who You Are
Two takes on the same idea — the ASD-STE100 controlled-English standard and the i-have-adhd Claude Code skill — on giving your AI a writing system.
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SoN 2.28: "That's good, how can we make it better?"
When I think about AI and automation, I see an opportunity opening up that goes well beyond the chatbots everyone’s being handed — well beyond prompting, too. One of the most…
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Paperwork Shot List
A shot list for the paperwork This week I’ve spent five hours or more in the car, driving between schools to move our kid from one to another for the new school year. It’s a mixed…
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SoN 2.27: I Just Talked With Someone Else's Vault
More than twenty years ago, I sat with a class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds and tried to show them what “connected to the internet” actually meant. We went looking on the…
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The model of the week changes by Thursday
Two headlines are eating the feeds this morning, and both have the shelf life of milk. Anthropic extended Claude Fable 5 to every paid plan through July 12 — a few more days with…
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Where You Keep the Final Say
I keep a tool wired into my AI setup that can read the actual text of Spanish law — the BOE, the official state gazette. In layperson terms it’s a connector (an “MCP server”) that…
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SoN 2.25: Stop guessing and use AI to pull the data
Stop guessing and pull the actual data =================================================== I help out a small, volunteer-run cat rescue. They do good work, and they post on…
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SoN 2.24: AI hasn't made me faster
AI hasn’t made me faster — it’s made me able to start Last Tuesday I came out of a meeting with a narrow window before the school run, and inside of it I did the following: sent a…
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What I Automate with AI
What I Automate with AI I went looking today for a list of everything I’ve got automated since I started this AI journey back in 2024. Every tool I’ve wired Claude into, every…
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SoN 2.22: How do you choose "the best" AI tool?
How do you choose "the best" AI tool? A friend asked me this week to explain how to use “all the different AI tools” — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, the lot. She wanted, in her words,…
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Measure twice, cut once — with two AIs
3 June 2026 When you work on your own, the thing you miss most is a second pair of eyes. Trades have known this forever. Carpenters say measure twice, cut once — because once…
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SoN 2.21: AI doesn't know when to stop. You have to.
Stay In Your Lane (Then Go Deeper) Honestly, I’ve been so busy I forgot what day it was and started the newsletter too late this week. But as I think I’ve mentioned before, with…
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SoN 2.19: It's 10pm. Do you know what your agents are doing? (Free)
The Context Gap (Free) Dear Reader, Who’s watching your AI agents? This past week alone: Codex shipped its Chrome extension, giving OpenAI’s agent access to your signed-in Gmail,…
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SoN 2.18: Where can I skill up on AI? (Free Edition)
Multi-Tool Fluency Is a Non Starter (Free Edition) Dear Reader, Which tool should I use? The job market case for getting decent at AI got clearer in the last year. PwC analysed…
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SoN 2.16: Ask your AI what it can already do (Free Edition)
You don't need more AI tools (Free Edition) Ask your AI what it can already do Last Friday, Maya and I spent an hour delivering a post-lunch workshop with about thirty-five people…
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SoN 2.15: Ask your AI to Ask You Questions (Free Edition)
Ask Your AI To Ask You Questions (Free) Ask your AI to ask you questions Last Saturday morning I sat down to write the weekly digest for my build-log site — seven posts from the…
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SoN Vol 2, Issue 14: What about everything we learned? (Free Edition)
What about everything we learned? (Free Edition) Hey there, What about everything we learned? Last week we sent the shutdown email for MyCityZen. It was a small product, but there…
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Context Is the New Bottleneck. So Is Judgment.
Tiago Forte says AI shifts the bottleneck from capability to context. He's right — but that only works if you still have opinions worth providing.
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You Feel Faster. Are You?
A randomized controlled study found AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower. They thought they'd been sped up by 20%.
