Morning friend ☕️

We’re still on the Builder’s Workshop Series, the series for those who are excited about AI, but maybe feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. We look at the mindset shift and a simple structure behind starting (or optimizing) your own thing with the help of AI.

Over the last 2 weeks you got through the door and then saw the need for a bench on which to build.

Welcome to Part 3 of The Builder's Workshop: The Shelves.

What’s on the shelves?
How does it fit in with everything we do in the workshop?

Grab your coffee.

Let's chat!

I've been writing this newsletter since August 2023.

Three years of blogging my thoughts. A hundred-odd posts. And until the 2nd of July this year, there wasn't a single file that said what any of it was supposed to sound like.

It lived in my head, and across a scatter of Google Drive documents that made sense to nobody but me.

I only noticed because I'd started building the system that now helps me write the book, and I sat down expecting the hard part to be the tools.

It wasn't the tools.

I'll come back to what it actually was. First I want to check something with you.

You've probably met this from the other side.

I’m sure you’ve given AI something that actually matters. A question about a real customer, a real decision, something with your name on it.

What comes back is competent and completely general. You could hand it to anyone.

So you rewrite the prompt and go again. The second answer is longer and no better.

I know where my head used to go at that point. I'm an engineer by training, but I'm no AI expert, and I read that as meaning the useful part was happening somewhere I couldn't get to.

It was the wrong conclusion, and the shelves are where you can see why.

Every real workshop has them, and nobody ever filled them in a weekend. They fill up slowly. Offcuts from old jobs. Spare parts. Odd brackets. The jar of screws you kept because that'll be useful one day.

Most of the stuff on my dad's shelves is still there from the 80’s. Nobody fills their shelves in one go.

You have stuff like that. So do I. We just don't call it material. We don’t put it on the shelves.

The rules of thumb you paid for with real mistakes. The way you can feel a project going wrong a week before anyone says so. All the places the textbook answer fails, and you know it fails, because you were standing there when it did. None of that feels like an asset.

It feels like Tuesday.

The hard part was that almost nothing I know was written down in a form a tool could use.

On Thursday the 2nd of July, at ten to midnight, I committed a file called blog_writing_style.md. A hundred and ninety-four lines. The commit message reads: Added writing style enhancements.

Part of it is just a list of things this newsletter should avoid. Verbatim, from the file:

“generic leadership advice motivational fluff.
hustle-culture.
certainty.
doom content.
AI-sounding LinkedIn polish.
academic lecture.
neat inspiration before the pressure is felt.”

There's nothing clever in that. It's what I'd learnt writing to you every Monday since 2023 and until that night, none of it was written down anywhere a system could read it.

It's messier than a screenshot makes it look, by the way. For a while I had three filenames living in two places at once. Two files called writing_style.md, two called editorial_rubric.md, two called trilogy_doctrine.md, and on the 6th of July I had to sit down and rule on which copy was the real one. Four of my nine doctrine files were near-empty while the actual content sat somewhere else under the same name.

Which is roughly what shelves look like. Not a catalogue.

And that voice file is still version 1.0. I wrote it on the Thursday, added the housekeeping the following Monday, and I haven't been back to it since. There's a lot it still doesn't say.

Here's where the bench from last week earns its keep.

When you ask AI for help with an empty question, it can only give you the average of everybody. And the average of everybody is nobody.

AI can sound competent on almost anything. It has read an enormous amount of writing.

But nothing has come off the shelves.

And the shelves only work because the bench is there. A page of your hard-won judgment pasted into a chat window is easy to lose by Thursday. The same page sitting in the folder you made last week is there every time you sit down, and every time you ask.

The door got you into the room.

The bench is where the work stays.

The shelves are what make it yours instead of everybody's.

Anand's version of this: There's a man called Anand in the novel I'm writing. He holds a standard, and he expects you to meet it. He'd say this in fewer words than I have:

“If you had to bring someone up to your actual level (not your job title, your real level) what would you have to teach them?”

That. That's what's on your shelves.

Whatever you're building, whether it’s a side business, the shop you already run, a tool for your team, a way of doing something at home that works because you do it, you're sitting on the same thing I was sitting on in June.

And stocking it starts absurdly small. One page. One text file.

The page you'd hand someone on their first day. The rules you actually follow, not the ones on the wall. The exceptions. The judgment calls you'd want them to make the way you'd make them.

A sales instinct. The way you scope a job. The unwritten rules of your team. The logic behind your family's budget.

Twenty minutes. Write the new-hire page. Don’t polish it. Nobody’s reading it except you and a machine.

Put it on the bench you set up last week. Then, the next time you ask AI for help, hand it that page first.

The page you’d hand a new hire contains the part AI can’t guess. And you can start writing it in twenty minutes.

I still don't know how much of what I know is actually on my shelves. A third of it? Less? The easy bits went down first, and I suspect the parts that matter most are the ones I haven't found words for yet.

If you do write your first page, tell me what surprised you about it. I read everything that comes back.

Until next Monday, friend ☕️

Vaugan