Stop Prompting. Start Delegating!

AI can fold proteins, beat the Go grandmaster, and make the household robot cooler … but also the military drone uncooler. But that’s the AI of the rich and powerful. We only catch wind of it indirectly … or, in the drone’s case, hopefully never.

But there’s more. Much more. For you, too. Here and now. No barrier to entry. No special training or super-tool. No waiting until the all-solving AI agent finally gets unlocked for you — the one that then demands half a day of onboarding right off the bat. No waiting for IT’s promising tool that finally gets rolled out with great fanfare. Only for you to quickly discover it does not do the one thing you could actually have used it for.

Rated: especially underwhelming.

It doesn’t come entirely free of effort here either, of course, but at least it comes without the wait: simple, hands-on, and tailored to you. By your own hand, no fuss. The one precondition is tweaking your mindset a little — not because it only works with the right attitude and only if you really, truly believe hard enough, but because we still tend to approach the AI tool with the wrong perception and the wrong expectations. It helps to let go a little, and to hand over a little control — in a controlled way.

Or, better, in manager-speak and put positively: Have it done instead of doing it. In other words, delegate.

AI can’t just correct your texts once — it can be your personal editor, one who knows and respects your writing style. AI can’t just help you pick a travel destination or recommend a restaurant on the ground — it can be your private tour guide. It can be your fitness and nutrition coach, your financial advisor, your rhetoric trainer; it can be a genuinely blunt critic, or your motivator and trainer for your first (half-)marathon. It can be a stand-in friend when you don’t have one within reach.

That’s frightening and fascinating at once, and you have to experience it to believe how good AI is at it. The list of possibilities is long. Very long. For inspiration, I once collected 127 non-trivial AI roles and arranged them into one possible layout. With no claim whatsoever to completeness or correctness.

The point of listing the roles is mainly to show what’s even possible in principle — but actually, concretely doable. I myself use nowhere near all of them, but some belong to my standard repertoire, some I keep in reserve, and some I only tried once to see what they could do.

And yes, you read that right. AI can also advise and help with finances, with your relationship, with health questions, with real life.

What, no disclaimer?

If we’re honest, we’ve been doing this all along — even before anyone had heard of AI, or before it existed in today’s form. We Googled ourselves more knowledge than our doctor had, so we could proactively question their diagnosis. We pieced together insider tips from more or less trustworthy internet sources to invest one step more cleverly. We made use of the virtual Dr. Sommer team and the swarm intelligence of forums and networks. The same thing works better and more easily with AI — but also a little more unsettlingly, because we no longer take every step ourselves; instead we hand framing info to a machine with power — and the machine does the rest.

You shouldn’t blindly trust anyone, and not any AI either. The thing between your ears is allowed to be used for important decisions. But AI can give you information and make recommendations. And it can do that damn well..

But surely you need an agent, or whatever it’s called, or the pricier subscription, or an account with the cool new AI provider for that?! And surely you have to set something up, otherwise all you get out is garbage, right?!

Nope, works without all that too. An AI tool of your choice and a prompt. You build the prompt yourself, easily. It’s far less complicated than you think, and it can even be fun.

We’ll start with a simple example and the meta-prompt — the prompt that simply produces well-structured prompts. Copy it and you’re set. The rest happens in chat mode. I’ve packed a few starter sentences into the AI role catalog. But once you’ve grasped the principle, you won’t need them anymore. They’re only there to keep the initial hurdle low.

And with that you move away from the daily mini-questions on vacation

“Where’s a good Italian place around here for dinner for 4 people”

toward

“You’re my travel planner for our 2-week family vacation on Corfu, Mom, Dad, 3 kids (3, 7, 16). No allergies, but Dad doesn’t like fish. Hotel is booked, but the 2 weeks want filling — with fun and good food. Make a plan with action and relaxation, and for our day trips find us something small and tasty for midday and something nicer in the evening with a little glass of wine for the parents, and be ready for spontaneous changes. Here’s the data…”.

The crucial point is that you phrase this freely, however you like. That’s only the briefing for the meta-prompt. The actual, cleanly structured prompt is what the meta-prompt builds out of it on its own. So you’re already delegating the prompting itself. Handy. And what comes out of this chat in the end is your personal Corfu tour guide. You save it and use it before and during the vacation. It won’t turn you into Super-Mom or Super-Dad, but it spares you a few extra loops of searching and takes a few decisions off your plate — or makes them easier … if you let it.

That’s exactly what delegating means: give context, set the frame, have it done.

And when the result isn’t as great as you’d hoped. Then rate it and reflect it back. Make your tour-guide prompt better. By saying what you don’t like. Mercilessly honest and without holding back. Be the boss. Be an asshole. Be nice too, for all I care — it just won’t get you better results.

Do you want to be the one who builds the deck, or the one who has it built? You’ve got the choice. Have you picked yourself an AI role yet? Try it. Subscribe to it.

My honest disclaimer: Did I just say AI can be your financial advisor, thereby explicitly inviting you to get financial advice from an AI without reflexively shouting “This is not financial advice!”?! Yes, I did. Let me make it even more concrete. Go buy Bitcoin! All of you. You too. No irony, dead serious.

Still no disclaimer?!

Fine, you’ll get one: If you’re seriously considering making major life decisions based on a no-name post on Substack or wherever, and the only thing holding you back is the absence of a disclaimer, then you’ve got entirely different and bigger problems than a few satoshis in your wallet. Almost everyone else is in the driver’s seat of their own life and doesn’t need the disclaimer anyway. And to the third group — the chancers who make a living off Abmahnungen: there are easier targets ;-)