The bigger the thing you are trying to make happen, the more layers of context you must navigate.AI is crap at holding context. It answers questions, and when someone in your team doesn’t know why they are asking things, the results are inevitable;

A weak business plan pretending to be a fund pitch dressed up as a marketing document.

A new AI platform, developers trapped between what their machine tells them to do, the results they get, and what they’re told to do based on those results, in an ever-degrading loop.

A young digital startup, idolising the Silicon Valley Venture Capital hustle, scale and exit model, with an absolute cash cow staring them in the face, that they don’t need to give up their equity to make happen.

What I’m seeing again and again in all of these is the promised land – how fricken amazing AI is (and it is) – getting in the way of people achieving things.

Ask a question, get an answer, sounds good – but without context, is it?

It’s insidious, like kicking the ultimate own goal, and I’m seeing it everywhere:

• Message by message in a group chat
• A multi-page generated document with half an answer buried somewhere, that introduces a new direction based on its follow-up provocations
• An email response that is clear, ticks the polite response boxes, acknowledges the initial query and does nothing to move things forward

These are ways for people to hide in the storm of the modern world, dressed up as efficiency, masquerading as insight.

If you want to make big things happen, it’s important to sideline people who refuse to abandon these behaviours.

Even small moments direct the labour of teams, crews and squads, up to entire departments, construction sites and Governments.

If you can see it happening, it’s quite obvious when people are too inexperienced, unfocused or unskilled to hold the necessary context.

Just Say No to Meat Proxies

Meat Proxy – “A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. They act only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”

Business is hard enough without having to pay superannuation and wages for half a team of meat proxies, convincing each other the best way to get ahead is to outsource thinking.

On the tools

I use Claude daily; every client and work area has its own project. I use Fyxer to sort my email, and a few times a week I use CustomGPTs I’ve built with OpenAI when I want to leverage specific domains of knowledge.

The speed at which ideas can be researched and correlated is truly stunning, though I promise you;

Abdicating expertise to people who aren’t capable, and expecting them to rise to the occasion because they have a pattern-matching, relatively sycophantic best friend egging them on, is a recipe for mediocrity, if not disaster.

Are you successful and ambitious?

Are you working on a very real, significant and potentially life-changing opportunity, but lack the bandwidth, connections, experience or capital to make it happen?

I can help.