If Press Pocket Guides
How to Describe Complex Ideas to Your AI
A Practical Guide to Specifications, Ontologies, and AI-Ready Work
Before you ask someone to build anything, define the work and the world it must operate in.
Most requests for work are a sentence and a hope. The builder guesses, and the guess is expensive to discover later. AI has made it cheap to do your own part first, which is to say what you want, who is involved, what you know, and how you will judge the result.
Forthcoming. The book is in review; its companion and tools are open now.
Your request is vague. An AI can help you fix that before anyone builds anything.
This Pocket Guide follows one invented request from a vague sentence to a package a builder, a vendor, or an AI agent can use. You will not write code or learn a file format. You will paste nine prompts, answer questions, and review plain-English summaries while an AI drafts a specification and a machine-readable model of the work.
It is short on purpose, it says what its example cannot show, and it never claims a check ran that did not.
What you will be able to do
- Turn a vague request into a brief you can approve
- Have AI draft a specification and a model of the work
- Tell facts, hypotheses, and guesses apart
- Make the specification and the model check each other
- Compare build, buy, extend, integrate, change, and wait
- Keep the package true when the world changes