I remember when I realized I was starting to use AI at work as if I were managing a team of AI employees . I got so excited, I immediately sketched the idea on a sheet of paper so I could share it with my teammates. What started as a sketch is now core to how I use AI agents to do things faster and better at work and at home. It’s an approach that naturally guides you toward the context engineering best practices that improve LLM output. ...

I used to think of AI as a tool I used. Now I think of it as a team I manage. This perspective evolved gradually as I used it daily and found myself rewriting the same persona prompts over and over again for the same types of tasks. I started systematically improving what I was doing until I found myself managing a team, which happened to be made up of AI agents, at the end of the 7-month journey that made me an AI enthusiast . ...

I was slow to start using generative AI, but over the last 7 months, AI has fundamentally changed how I work. I’ve gone from occasionally using AI to write text, to using it to create Python scripts, to now having a team of five custom AI agents that I collaborate with daily. I’m seeing how quickly the benefits are compounding, and as a result, I’ve been AI-pilled. I began learning about LLM-based gen AI in earnest in 2024. I read all the most popular books at the time, but my exposure remained primarily theoretical. I learned how LLMs work fundamentally, but the biggest practical takeaway was the idea of assigning a persona to chatbots to improve their output. That’s basic prompt engineering, e.g. “You are a copywriter with 15+ years of experience in consumer tech. Help me write a marketing email about this product.” On the rare occasion I used a chatbot, I always remembered to assign it a persona. ...