I shared a prompt to help create “AI expert prompts” to help you learn a domain, and I’m realizing I didn’t mention the dangers. As every company that gives you a genie to talk to says “they can get things wrong.” The problem is that as a non-expert you don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know when the genie is so confidently wrong.

When I started a company I figured, why not do the books myself for the first couple of months and then pay someone to review it later? I created a genie armed with the standard Swedish accounting plan, verified some of the big things I did (inject some extra starting capital) and could find clear examples of how it’s done. I did some other things and just did as it said, but did get a bit complacent because the big one just worked, and didn’t research as thoroughly.

I was reading Our First Accelerated Expertise Course from Commoncog, and the section Why This Training Approach is So Weird got me keen on seeing if I could get the genie to help me build experts for sensemaking, so I can learn to see the world as those experts do.

So far I’ve created one expert, and I’ve had a useful conversation (I realized I was not seeing the forest for the trees), so sharing what I have and leaving a crumb for the future. 🙂

I have been wondering how Steve Yegge gets quality when vibing and this seems to be how, from the emergency manual Tending the Invisible Garden:

When you work with Gas Town, you don’t usually have time to inspect the code you’re creating. That’s not your role. But you need to make sure the code meets your quality bar. How do you ensure your garden is healthy if you can’t see it?

[… more]

Now that I’ve moved back to Sweden without most of my stuff (it’ll be on a ship soon enough), everyone’s got suggestions on necessities. Need to buy all the tools (so I can fix things), the kitchen equipment (because the kitchen is very basic), the cleaning tools (okay, the basicness here might hinder), and the big one: a car. “There are such distances now that you just have to have a car.”

I keep pushing back with “maybe, let’s see in a few weeks.”

I’m moving back to Sweden, and something that surprised me was that if you’ve been registered as living abroad, becoming a registered resident again (folkbokförd) takes 4-6 weeks of processing. Skatteverket (IRAS/population registry) can reject your application. I assume they will if they think you’re primarily moving back to mooch off the Swedish welfare state (I’m not, I promise 😅).

I’m allowed to stay in Sweden, but operating in society is hard, because most systems can’t find any information on me. Practically a ghost (I was gonna say stateless but that feels distasteful to try and put myself together with people who have real problems). And from official system’s POV I don’t currently live anywhere. I have already moved out of Singapore and my employment pass has been cancelled. I have an old address registered in Sweden (I officially lived at my mom’s place when I went to Singapore in 2012), but I have a new apartment I live in now.

I came across Steph Ango’s Concise explanations accelerate progress:

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.

Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and understand. The sooner your idea is understood, the sooner others can build on it.

I struggle with conciseness. I tend to veer verbose and ramble through what I write and explain. Because I want to give the other person a chance to see what I was thinking as I was going through something.

Steph Ango says If you’re remote, ramble:

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

I love this idea! I genuinely think the more we write and share the better, and I’ve noticed the effect of similar things that grew out of working remotely with people.

I’m in Bengaluru to attend a friend’s wedding, and it has been fascinating walking around and seeing “the creative ways” of cable management, and my perspective from Singapore and Sweden is definitely to question the safety and longevity.

As I was writing up angry at the genie, about getting frustrated at a bot for not having my context, I realized I’d done the same thing to a human colleague just months earlier.

A new colleague has been speed-running five years of my accumulated context, and I was getting really annoyed at all their questions. Why weren’t they making any reasonable assumptions? They’re a human after all, with decades of experience. In hindsight, I think that’s exactly why they’re not assuming and instead clarifying.

A colleague mentioned he’d like a genie coach to practice first principles thinking, because we had talked about the cooking coach I made and have been using. So I decided to give it a try, whipped up a prompt, and gave it a spin.

I had a problem I’d been working on and wanted to see if there was another way of thinking about it. I also asked it to add behavioral economics as an angle because I’ve been interested in pulling in a more human angle to my thinking (still learning what that means).

Curtis shared the DIKW pyramid, that I hadn’t heard of, and said that he feels that the genies helps him process the first two layers much more quickly than he can alone, that it can somewhat help penetrate into knowledge but not much. Which allows him to spend less time in D/I (collection) and then more to then K/W (processing?)

Anthropic has released some recordings from their Code w/ Claude event in May and the Prompting for Agents presentation’s “key principles” are basically to empathise with your agent, imagine it’s a brilliant new grad, book smart but missing all things practical at their first job: You need clear concepts, unambiguous instructions, and well-named and designed tools.

I’m more than a little amused that we’re basically coming to a point where, if things pan out with the genies, then the best wranglers will be the ones that can empathise the most with others. Then again, I always thought the brilliant asshole was the exception, they only survive if they’re in charge or are legacy to the company. And sitting in on the review meetings at work… it’s definitely the ones that help the team that we like the most, even if we sometimes need to push them to have their name on something so people don’t overlook them.