Quick note on why this community exists. There's plenty of AI content out there. Most of it is either breathless hype ("AI will replace everyone by Tuesday") or productivity theater ("47 prompts that will change your life"). Both are exhausting and neither helps you actually think better. What's missing is a room full of people treating AI the way it deserves to be treated — as a genuinely strange, genuinely powerful thinking partner that's still new enough that nobody has it fully figured out, and we're all benefiting from comparing notes. That's the room I'm trying to build here. Operators and professionals who use AI to think harder, not work less. Who are willing to share the prompts that actually moved the needle, the experiments that flopped, and the weird moments where AI surprised them in ways they couldn't have predicted. If that sounds like your kind of room, you're already in the right place. Introduce yourself in the comments — what's one way you're currently using AI as a thought partner that you wish more people knew about?

A prompt I use probably twice a week, stealing it from nobody and giving it to everybody: "I'm about to make this decision: [decision]. Here's my reasoning: [reasoning]. Steelman the opposite position. Then tell me which version of me — the one making this choice or the one making the opposite choice — sounds more like they're rationalizing vs. reasoning." That last line is the unlock. Most "play devil's advocate" prompts give you a polite counterargument. This one makes the AI evaluate your thinking quality, not just your conclusion. I've killed three bad ideas this quarter with it. I've also pushed through on two things I was about to chicken out of, because the AI called out that my "reasoning" was actually fear wearing a suit. Try it on the next real decision you're sitting on. Report back.

Permission to share something a little uncomfortable: I talk to AI about things I wouldn't talk to my team about. Not because I'm hiding anything. Because some thoughts need to be half-formed and stupid before they become useful, and there's no professional context where you get to be half-formed and stupid out loud. "I'm worried this hire isn't working out and I don't know if it's me or them." "I think our pricing is wrong but I can't articulate why." "This client makes me dread Mondays and I want to figure out if it's worth the money." These aren't prompts that produce deliverables. They produce clarity. And clarity is the actual bottleneck for most business owners — not execution, not tools, not tactics. If you're only using AI for things you'd be comfortable saying in a board meeting, you're using maybe 10% of what it's actually good for.

Something I do every Sunday night that has quietly become the highest-leverage hour of my week: I open a fresh chat and dump everything from the previous week — wins, frustrations, decisions I'm sitting on, things clients said that stuck with me, numbers that surprised me. Just a brain dump. No formatting, no structure. Then I ask one question: "What patterns are you seeing that I might be too close to notice?" The answers are routinely better than what I'd get from a $500/hour business coach. Not because AI is smarter than the coach — but because I'd never pay a coach to listen to 45 minutes of unfiltered context. With AI, I can. The thought partner use case isn't about getting answers. It's about getting an outside perspective on demand, with zero social cost.

Hot take: the people getting the worst results from AI are usually the smartest people in the room. Here's why. Smart, experienced operators have spent decades building expertise. When they sit down with AI, they unconsciously dumb down their prompts because they assume the AI needs the simple version. So they get simple answers back and conclude AI is overrated. The move is the opposite. Talk to AI the way you'd talk to a sharp consultant you just hired — full context, real stakes, your actual half-formed opinions. Tell it what you're wrestling with. Tell it where you might be wrong. Let it push back. The quality of what you get out is directly proportional to how much of your real thinking you put in. If your prompts read like Google searches, you're going to get Wikipedia answers.