Adversary · Paper 01 · 12 min
The model is a fast intern
Treat Grok, and every other model, as a sleepless junior who has read the internet and has never been in the room. Useful. Not in charge.
Speed is not taste. The intern will fill a vacuum with consensus. If you do not give it a mean brief, it will give you the 80-team product for free.
Thesis
Why this paper exists
People either worship the model or refuse it. Both are how you get beaten by someone who can hold a knife to its output.
- Brief a model like a junior, not like an oracle
- Demand options, then kill most of them
- Never let it choose the chairs
Job description
The intern may: generate the obvious field, draft a script you will rewrite, list loss conditions you will sharpen, produce boilerplate you will not emotionally attach to, argue the other side on command.
The intern may not: pick the turn, freeze the scope, decide what is true about a room it has not sat in, or write the corridor sentence unsupervised. Those are faculty work.
Mean briefs
A kind brief ('help me brainstorm a climate app') produces slop because it is a vacuum. A mean brief names the constraint, the judge, the kill zone, and the chair you will not give up. 'Eight hours, one nurse judge, no IoT, kill anything a model would suggest first.' Now it is useful.
The quality of the intern is the quality of the refusal you put in the prompt.
Disagreement as an instrument
Ask the same question twice with opposite incentives: 'why we win' and 'why we lose'. The gap between the two answers is often the real work. Consensus between them is the kill zone again.
You can also make it play a hostile judge. It will be ruder than your friends and cheaper than a panel. Then you write the answer that would shut it up — in your voice, not its.
Drill
Write a mean brief for a live idea: constraint, judge, kill zone, chair you will not give up. Run it once. Kill everything that looks like a weather report of consensus.
Knowledge check