First Light
Treat AI like a person, but tell it what kind of person it is.
Ethan Mollick
Your life, one week at a time
Each dot is a single week. The Stoics kept death in view not to despair, but to spend the squares that remain.
It reads as a prompting tip. It is a hiring test.
Watch what most requests actually say. "Write something about the new pricing." No one would hand that to a new colleague on their first morning and expect anything usable back.
We hand it to the machine, then blame the machine for the mush that returns.
Naming the person is the work, and it is harder than it looks.
A pricing analyst who has watched three companies undercharge for two years is a different colleague from a copy editor who cuts every adverb. One will argue with your number. The other will halve your paragraph.
You cannot summon either until you decide which one the job needs — which means deciding what the job actually is.
Here is the part that stings. If you cannot describe the person, you cannot grade the work either. Whatever comes back will sound competent, and you will take it, because you never set a bar for it to clear. Fluency fills the space where a standard should be.
The specification is the thinking. The typing was never the expensive part.
So today, before the next request: one sentence, written first. Who would I hire for this, and what would get them fired? Paste that sentence in ahead of the ask, and notice how much of your own judgment you had been leaving unsaid.