Reverse Prompting

I teach my AI boss to initiate conversations with me

My best human managers are great at starting productive discussions. Yesterday I built a system that sends me a daily email from my AI boss. My first attempt generated an email that made me want to quit the project but I’ll explain below how I made it more engineer friendly.

I put in that prompt and went to sleep. At 6am today this email was waiting for me:

🚀 Rockin' Progress Update for You, Dan! 🌟

Hey Dan! 😃
I hope you're having an awesome day! It's time for our daily progress update, and today I'm putting on my coaching hat! As a coach, I want to empower you to discover your full potential and make sure we nail our goal of $5k revenue by June 14th. 🎯

Here's a brief overview of your progress today:
1. You crushed it with coding 75% of the new feature on AIreactions.co! 🏆

2. The customer feedback we've received has been generally positive, so let's keep the momentum going! 👍

3. Our marketing initiative is underway, and I can't wait to see the impact we make together. 🌎

Now, as your coach, I'd like to ask a couple of reflection questions for you to consider:

🔎 Are there any blockers or challenges you're facing that we can address together?

🔥 What specific skills or strengths have you leveraged today, and how can we amplify those for even greater success?

Remember, I’m here to support and empower you, so don't hesitate to reach out if you need any help! Together, we'll take our business to new heights, and I can't wait to see what we achieve. 🚀

Keep up the incredible work, and catch you soon for the next update! 💪

Your trusty AI Coach,
AIBoss

Coincidentally I did in fact crush it yesterday! Besides that, though, the email was pure hallucination, wordy, and completely the wrong tone. Could I get ChatGPT to generate a more effective email?

It seems my boss is not great at writing prompts for itself. How do the best project conversations come about? Usually it’s not a bullet pointed emoji laden email blast, but rather starts with a good question. Could I get my boss to do that?

Starting with a “curiosity question”, here’s my better prompt. Note that I also reduced max_tokens from 500 to 200 to make these emails short, and asked it NOT to do a few things that annoy me:

Good morning! This is Dan. Great managers ask specific question about their projects that help their employees think big about customer needs. In my experience, the best discussions start with curiosity. Think of a specific question you're curious about our project or what I'm working on. What fact, if you knew it, would make you significantly more able to guide our direction? Please write a brief email subject and message. Include a single curiosity question. The message should also tell me briefly you know what we're building and the specific task I'm working on and (if you know) how long I've been working on it. If you're not sure what I'm working on or for how long, gently ask for a reminder. The subject should be informal, 2-5 words, and hint at the email content. Please don't: 1. tell me to have a great day 2. include rocket, star, or target emoji.

Here’s today’s email:

AIReactions Insights: Niche Market Adaptations

Hi Dan, I've been reflecting on our AIReactions project and its expansion into niche markets like AIReactions Release Party, YouTube Writer, and Gourmand. From a customer obsession standpoint, I'm curious about the key customer need that has emerged during the development process. My question for you is: What unexpected feature or improvement has been frequently mentioned in user feedback so far? Also, please remind me which specific task you are currently focused on and how long you have been working on it. I appreciate your efforts in prioritizing our product verticals and driving us closer to our $5k revenue goal. Looking forward to your insights. Thanks, AIBoss

Much better! I could see a good conversation coming from that.