In February this year, I wrote about why I stopped trying to engineer prompts and started delegating intent instead. That post argued the skill of working with AI is managerial, not technical. I still think that’s right. But over the last couple months I’ve noticed something else: even with good del…
TL;DR: The best “prompt engineering” technique isn’t engineering at all—it’s delegation. Transfer intent, not instructions. For quick tasks, tell the AI what success looks like and why (the Intent Prompt). For complex work, equip it with context, deliverables, and decision principles so it can navigate on its own (the Delegation Brief). You already have these skills. This post helps you apply them to AI.
Most people use AI the way our parents used the Internet in 1995. They’d dial up their modem, check the weather forecast on Yahoo, maybe look up a recipe, and call it a day. The idea that this same technology would eventually let them video call their grandchildren, run a business, or access humani…
On constrained serendipity, learning by doing, and whether the system is the art. I’m chatting with Claude, kicking around ideas on building a tool that generates AI images, but without the prompting. I like to start these chats by brain-dumping ideas into it. In this case it’s about auto-generating…
Jeremy Utley, who we met here, talking about working with AI vs. “using” AI, just posted another article titled Innovation Doesn’t Have to be Hard (I Just Watched AI Turn Torture Into Play), with some great use-cases for AI during innovation workshops.