Give the AI the long letter

There is an old line, usually credited to Blaise Pascal. "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one."

The short letter was the hard one. Someone had to take all the messy thinking and boil it down.

With AI agents, I think this is flipped.

When you tell an agent what you really want, don't try to write the short prompt. Give it the long one. Give it all the messy details. Go back and forth. Say this, then change your mind and say that.

All of that is information it uses. The work of turning a long letter into a short one used to be ours. Now the AI does it, and it does it without effort.

Lex Fridman described this on his podcast with DHH, at 2:16:43:

So I, I run with this thing. It's called Plaud. So I, I just hook it up on my, you know on my T-shirt here... I speak a long prompt, like, and a lot of it, it's like stream of consciousness reasoning. So I'll sometimes just change my mind about a design, but all of that is in there.

And then you have this gigantic thing that's often 10, 15, 20 minute me discussing the full design, and I find that to be really, really powerful. Because it doesn't have the problem... of overspecification.

There's been prompts that I had for an hour, and I'm just running and... speaking. I highly recommend people try a voice-based... speaking for prolonged periods of time.

That got me thinking about how I work.

A massive unlock in my own AI work has been Wispr Flow. I talk to the AI instead of typing to it. Talking is slower than thinking, but it is much faster than typing. So I can say far more, and what I give it is deeper and richer.

I haven't gone as far as Lex. I don't do twenty minute prompts yet. Mine are more back and forth. I talk for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, and then we go again. Even that is much better than when I typed.

I am not sponsored by Wispr. But hey, Wispr, if you are interested, I would love to do a deal.

Joking aside, it is an incredible product.