Practical AI · Episode 56

Your First AI Employee Is A File You Haven’t Written Yet

Three layers, five parts, one job you can write this weekend. Everything on this page is a document. That is the whole point.

The three layers

1The seat
“You are not a chatbot. You hold a seat on this company’s org chart.”

One file. What this employee owns, the standard it works to, and what it will never do. Write the A-player version of the seat, not the mess the seat is today.

The boundaries block is the part people skip and the part that matters most. If it never sends anything on its own, you can let it run at 5:30am without watching it.

The one moveWrite what it will never do before you write what it does.
2The jobs
“One file per job. Always the same five parts.”

This is the layer nobody wants to write and the only one that decides whether any of it works. Every job file has the same shape, so you stop inventing a format each time.

Trigger · what starts it. What it reads · where the material lives. The standard · your judgement, written down once. The output · what comes back and in what form. Who closes the loop · the human who decides.

The one moveSpend your time on the standard. That is the only part a machine cannot infer, and it is the part that makes the output yours instead of generic.
3The wiring
“You call it, something calls it, or the clock calls it.”

Three ways a job runs and that is the entire list. Most people stop at the first one, which is why their AI only works when they are sitting there.

The jump that changes your week is the third. Take the thing you do every Monday and let it run Sunday night.

The one movePut exactly one job on a timer. Not all of them. One.

See the actual files

Layer 1

The job description you write for a machine

The whole seat, start to finish. Read how short it actually is.

Open it →
Layer 2

One job, written down

A single real job with all five parts filled in, including the line that tells it never to pad a list to hit a round number.

Open it →
Layer 3

What an AI-run sales department looks like

Every box on the chart is a document. Nobody drew this. It assembled itself once the jobs were written.

Open it →

The thing worth knowing before you start. A human absorbs most of a job without being told. The hallway, the person who has been there nine years, six months of watching. None of that exists for a machine.

A person reads the job description once, on day one. The machine reads it before every single task, forever. So anything you did not write down does not exist. Not harder. Does not exist.

Which means the bottleneck is almost never the tool or the budget. It is the part of the job that only lives in somebody’s head.

One job. This weekend. Pick something you do every week that you could describe out loud in two minutes. Write the five parts. That file is your first employee.

The company that gets written down is the company that can be operated. Everyone else is typing prompts one at a time.

Funding · Week 41

Where The AI Money Went

$12.42B across 71 AI companies, 51.7% of every venture dollar. Four rounds cleared a billion each and together they took 80% of it. Strip those four and the rest of the market raised half what it did last week.

Open the report →
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