Good morning 👋
Now that we’ve officially. entered into the late stage of AI adoption, it’s time to have an honest conversation about how many of you are using ChatGPT, Claude, and other tools to become more effective in your day-to-day.
Are you using AI as a force multiplier, or are you just asking questions that you could ask Google?
We love it when smart people give applications and use cases, and we’re breaking down how signull vs. noise (one of my favorite Substacks) uses AI to think more clearly and make better decisions.
Here’s how he does that …
TOP
how to think with AI 🧠
We’re at a point now where not knowing how to use AI is a huge liability to your personal ability.
Most people don’t know how to use AI. They treat it like they would treat Google, but the real unlock from AI comes when you goes several layers below the information.
The real goal is co-creation, co-reflection, and co-ideation so that you can unload your thoughts, have them challenged and organized, and ultimately used to see things with more clarity.
Here’s a dead simple method of getting more from your AI of choice - courtesy of signull vs. noise (one of the only Substacks I pay for):
open your ai of choice (claude’s better right now for this imho, but gpt-4o’s solid too).
start talking. literally dump your thoughts. no filter. write or talk like you’re texting a friend or ranting to yourself in a journal.
when you hit friction, ask it questions. things like:
“what am i really trying to say?”
“can you simplify this?”
“what’s the strongest counterargument?”
“what’s missing here?”
“how would a smarter version of me reframe this?”
let it reflect back. not just rephrase. push it. argue. build.
Clarity > answers.
Used lazily, AI is a crutch for lazy cognition.
Used correctly, AI is a second brain that allows you to stop making decisions in a vacuum.
TWEET
HEADLINES
VCs shoot for the stars, send space-tech funding on course for new record (Pitchbook)
Which Coding Assistants Retain Their Customers and Which Ones Don’t (The Information)
More Than 80% of Americans Haven’t Paid for News in the Past Year (The Information)
New Vintage Partners is “the GP’s new best friend they didn’t know they wanted” (VCJ)
RECS
Confluence.VC courses: Pay less for all of our courses and info products
LINKS
📋 An AI Glossary: The top 20+ most common AI terms simply explained
🤨 Retention—the situationship of SaaS: Monitoring churn shows you what users didn’t understand or didn’t value and is your most honest feedback loop
🥸 The Next Interface is a Face: Avatars are emerging as the new interface between humans and computers
☠️ Death by 1000 Authorizations: Founders can rebuild the healthcare system and rebuild trust by using AI to streamline the repetitive, rules-driven, paper-heavy workflow
🔑 From Hustle to High Gear—How AI is Unlocking Scale for SMBs: Main Street is emerging as tech’s next frontier due to AI laying down a new kind of infrastructure offering the operators unprecedented autonomy and access to the best tools to run their businesses
📶 The State of the Software Engineering Market: Is “learning to code” still sound advice?
Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.
Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.
- Clay
(Founder @ Confluence.VC | GP @ Outlaw)
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