I’m in Bengaluru to attend a friend’s wedding, and it has been fascinating walking around and seeing “the creative ways” of cable management, and my perspective from Singapore and Sweden is definitely to question the safety and longevity.

As I was writing up angry at the genie, about getting frustrated at a bot for not having my context, I realized I’d done the same thing to a human colleague just months earlier.

A new colleague has been speed-running five years of my accumulated context, and I was getting really annoyed at all their questions. Why weren’t they making any reasonable assumptions? They’re a human after all, with decades of experience. In hindsight, I think that’s exactly why they’re not assuming and instead clarifying.

A colleague mentioned he’d like a genie coach to practice first principles thinking, because we had talked about the cooking coach I made and have been using. So I decided to give it a try, whipped up a prompt, and gave it a spin.

I had a problem I’d been working on and wanted to see if there was another way of thinking about it. I also asked it to add behavioral economics as an angle because I’ve been interested in pulling in a more human angle to my thinking (still learning what that means).

Curtis shared the DIKW pyramid, that I hadn’t heard of, and said that he feels that the genies helps him process the first two layers much more quickly than he can alone, that it can somewhat help penetrate into knowledge but not much. Which allows him to spend less time in D/I (collection) and then more to then K/W (processing?)

Anthropic has released some recordings from their Code w/ Claude event in May and the Prompting for Agents presentation’s “key principles” are basically to empathise with your agent, imagine it’s a brilliant new grad, book smart but missing all things practical at their first job: You need clear concepts, unambiguous instructions, and well-named and designed tools.

I’m more than a little amused that we’re basically coming to a point where, if things pan out with the genies, then the best wranglers will be the ones that can empathise the most with others. Then again, I always thought the brilliant asshole was the exception, they only survive if they’re in charge or are legacy to the company. And sitting in on the review meetings at work… it’s definitely the ones that help the team that we like the most, even if we sometimes need to push them to have their name on something so people don’t overlook them.