Posts tagged learning · HowToUseAICleverly

I built one honest profile document and had Claude play a hard-to-please recruiter before interviews

Every interview comes back to the same four questions. Tell me about yourself. Why this role. What are your weaknesses. Where do you see yourself in five years. A generic answer to those is always sitting right there, ready to say — and it always sounds exactly like what it is. So I wrote one document about myself, once. My education, each past role described as what actually happened rather than a pile of adjectives, the tools I really use, how I want to sound in the room, and a section naming where I am genuinely weaker. That last section is the one that does the work. A vague weakness gets a vague answer back. The more real the constraint, the more the assistant has to work with, instead of writing generic confidence around me. Before each interview I paste that document in along with the actual job posting, and give one instruction: play a demanding recruiter for this specific role, ask the sceptical questions too, and push back on anything generic or anything the document does not support. Hard to please, not encouraging.

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Workflowspiedino1mo agoPlaybook

How I turn a nonfiction book into a Claude skill instead of a summary

A summary tells you what a book says. Six months later it is useless, because you cannot remember which bullet applies to the situation actually in front of you. So I stopped making summaries. I extract the decision procedure instead — the steps someone following that method would really take, plus the judgment calls the book flags along the way — and save it as a skill file the assistant loads whenever the topic comes up. Then I consult it the way you would call someone who knows, instead of trying to remember what they once told you. The test I use is simple. Could you hand this to a new hire who never read the book, and would they be able to apply it? If not, I extracted the wrong thing and I go back.

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