Volume 38: Why Your Best AI Idea Is Stuck in Someone's Inbox
When an AI tool misbehaves, "train it more" is usually the wrong instinct. Prompting handles one-off tasks, retrieval handles changing information, and fine-tuning earns its cost only at high volume, so here is how to choose the right lever.
Your AI Rollout Is Stalling on Your Org Chart
Your best AI idea is probably stuck in someone's inbox, and the reason is structural, not technical. My team stopped waiting for the org chart to catch up and built a new operating model on top of it instead.
Steal My Prompt Vol. 38: The Email Thread Extractor
A thread with thirty-seven messages, and you still cannot tell what was decided. Paste it into this prompt and it separates settled from open, names who owns what, flags where people talked past each other, and drafts the reply that closes the loop.
Volume 37: Better AI Is Discipline, Not a Larger Budget
Every commercial AI you use was trained to be helpful through a process most professionals have never heard of. It is why these tools feel useful instead of bizarre, and also why they sometimes tell you what you want to hear. Here is how that training works.
The Cost of Using AI Is Moving From Dollars to Discipline
I hit my AI session limit mid-thought, already paying for the hundred-dollar plan, with no way forward but to pay more. Paying would have fixed that night, not the habit. The cost of using AI well is shifting from dollars to discipline, and here are the three habits that kept me building.
Steal My Prompt Vol. 37: The Decision Log Builder
The decision you made on Tuesday is gone by Friday, along with the options you weighed and why you chose. This prompt turns a 60-second voice memo into a structured log entry, then runs a quarterly review to surface your patterns and the choices overdue for a second look.
Volume 36: A Maine Mill Town Wrote the Better Playbook
Most professionals believe fine-tuning an AI model on company data teaches it the business. It does not. Fine-tuning shapes how a model behaves, not what it knows, and confusing the two is why so many internal AI pilots quietly fail.
The Data Center Fight Is More Complicated Than the Headlines
I keep coming back to the gap behind the loudest voices in the data center fight. The costs are real and immediate, the upside is still mostly unproven, and one Maine mill town is quietly showing the rest of us a better way to build.
