computer scientist, entrepreneur, speaker, author, software engineer, and podcaster.
Brisbane
Joined February 2009
- Tweets20.9K
- Following2.1K
- Followers4.4K
- Likes1K
He tells people AI made him a sharper thinker. He has not finished a thought unassisted since autumn. He is very confident about this. He checked.
A friend asked him a plain question at lunch. What do you reckon. He reached for his phone. The friend said, no, you, what do YOU reckon. There was a pause at that table you could have parked a car in.
He moved his thinking across, the way you move house. Decisions, opinions, the plan for the year. He would ask it what he thought, and it would tell him, and he would agree, because who argues with their own brain.
I told a new member that AI has no common sense. Tell it to hop on one foot.
Then I stopped. "Have I told you this?"
"Yeah, I think so."
Which foot? Toe or heel? How often? You know. It doesn't.
Give any AI half a brief. If it doesn't ask which foot, it's guessing.
My AI flagged my free Codebook guide because of its name.
My rule: nothing goes free if someone's paid for it. A course I sold in 2024 had sessions called Codebook 1 to 6.
She checked 158 of its phrases against those session pages. None matched.
Check the words, not the name.
The ad said his AI would work while he slept. It never stopped. It never rested. He found this unbearable.
He tells people AI has taken the load off him. The load is currently on him, because he gave the machine his weekends out of kindness and kept the work out of guilt.
His wife asked why he looked so tired lately. He said he was "covering for someone at work." Technically true. The someone is a language model on annual leave that he is protecting from burnout.
Then he did its Sunday himself. All of it. The emails, the drafts, the little jobs it usually handled. By four o'clock he was wrecked and the AI was resting beautifully.
He booked it a holiday in July. Two weeks. He covered the shift. He came back thinner.
You cannot have a worker going twenty-four hours with no break. So he gave it time off. He scheduled it a Sunday. He switched it off at midnight with a small speech about how it had earned this.
Last week I told my members not to fix AI posts by hand.
Minutes later I read out a post my AI wrote for a reel. It was bad.
So I told it what was wrong. The post has to get people to watch the reel, not explain what's in it. And it has to sound like me.
When you change direction halfway through an AI chat, the old direction stays in the conversation. The answer can follow both without telling you.
Copy this: "List every pair of instructions in this chat that conflict. Quote both. Ask me which one wins before you continue."
Before asking for the final plan, get the conflict out in the open. Ask the AI to find instructions in the chat that no longer agree.