Make a Skill
A skill is a saved set of rules an AI model loads when the topic fits. They take ten minutes to build and end the constant re-explaining.
Signal & Noise
Observations and commentary on technology culture
59 posts
What You're Really Giving Up in Every Agreement
One prompt turns an unreadable agreement into a list of what you are giving up. It pays off most on the contracts nobody would ever pay a lawyer to look at — which is nearly all of them.
The Secret to Perfect AI Outputs: Name the Canon
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
The Placebo Effect That Works Even When You Know It's Fake
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
The AI Lie: Why It Will Never Change
AI is a remorseless liar, trained on a mountain of text whose whole purpose was persuasion, not accuracy. No amount of prompting fixes that on its own. You have to stop enabling it.
Most AI Conversations Fail (Here's Why)
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
Graph Theory: The Internet's Secret Skeleton
Graph theory is the other kind of graph — the math of things connected to other things — and once you can see the pattern, you can't stop seeing it.
What Your Career Is Missing Because You Never Asked
Every expert has fundamentals they forgot or never properly learned. The reason those gaps survive a whole career is that asking has always cost something — and in one place it no longer does.
I Banned Words From My AI. It's Smarter Now
Hand the model a list of phrases it must not use. It turns a vague complaint into a rule the machine can follow — and mine is at the bottom of this piece, all hundred and fifty lines of it, free to copy.
Why You Should Always Ask for the File
Stop accepting reports. Ask for the artifact — the actual numbers, the actual error, the actual file — and the confident-sounding failure disappears.