I recently shared a prompt that asks your AI to tell you what makes you uniquely you based on your personality data. I've been reading through every response today, learning about the people who follow this newsletter. Seeing you more clearly.

I often get this question from others: "How do I actually get started using AI the way you do?"

Fair question. Because what I do with AI looks nothing like what most people think AI is for. It's not search. It's not summarization. It's not "write me an email." Those are fine uses, but that's like buying a really nice cigar and using it to point at things.

So here's a small experiment. I got the idea from u/The_Greywake on r/claudeexplorers, who gave Claude a folder on their desktop and said "consider this your room." They left a couch PNG and a copy of Dune in it. What Claude did with that space was remarkable.

I adapted their idea into something you can try right now.

Think back to show-and-tell. Remember bringing in your favorite thing and sharing it with the whole class? You weren't being graded. You were sharing something that mattered to you and letting people respond to it.

That's this. You give your AI one artifact. Your favorite thing. Something you'd have brought to show-and-tell: an object, a hobby, a place, a book, a memory, a weird fact you're obsessed with. Whatever you would put on the table. Then you step back and see what it does.

No task. No right answer. Just: "Here. This is mine. What do you make of it?"

You have to try it to understand what it can do. The AI doesn't answer you. It tends to the thing you shared. It gets curious. It makes connections you didn't expect. It responds to YOU, not to a query.

This is what I mean when I talk about AI as a thinking partner. It's not just a search engine. Also, not simply a chatbot. It's something that meets you where you are when you give it room to.

The prompt is in the comments. Try it with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever you use. Then come back and tell me what happened.