Decide first, then ask the AI

Ask an AI what a client's homepage should lead with, and you'll have a fluent answer in seconds. Once you've seen it, it's hard to think past it.

So before I ask the AI anything that needs judgment, I write my own answer down. What the homepage is for. Which photo leads. A few lines, in a file, with a date on it. It can be wrong, and it usually needs adjusting. But it exists before the machine's version does, and that changes how I read the machine's version.

The order matters. First you, with your position written down. Then the evidence: what the client sent, what a search turns up. Then the AI. Then you again. Put the two answers side by side and decide. Where you agree, move on. Where you differ, one of you knows something the other doesn't, and your job is to find out which.

This is one for a fictional bakery. Regulars come for bread, not cakes, so the position is the morning queue photo. Then the evidence, and what I'm unsure about. Don't skip that line. It tells you where the AI might actually help. Below it, after the AI has answered, what it said and what I did. It wanted to lead with cakes because they carry a higher margin. Maybe they do. But nobody gave it any margins. It made up a reason that sounded commercial, so my answer stood, and the file says why.

Look at the two habits side by side. Ask first, and you're editing its draft. You argue with its headings and its order, and you rarely step outside them. Decide first, and you're comparing two drafts, one of them yours, and every disagreement turns into a question you can check. Make a save point with the position file before you open the chat, and your version history shows you decided first. When a client asks how much of the work the AI did, you can show them.

Sometimes the AI will be right and you'll be wrong. That's part of why you asked. Change your mind, and add a line to the position file saying what changed it. Sounding confident doesn't count as a reason. The other half of the habit is a log, one file, where every time the AI is wrong or sure about something it couldn't know, you write down what it said and how you caught it. After a few weeks you'll see patterns. Maybe it keeps inventing dates, or reaches for the same layout every time. Each pattern becomes a rule in the project file it reads at the start of every session.

An entry looks like this. The AI wrote family-run since 1998 into the bakery's homepage copy. Nothing the client sent mentions 1998. It sounded right, and that's how a line like this gets through. I caught it because I check every fact against a source, and this one had none. So it became a placeholder and a question for the client.

Write your answer down first. Then ask.