ZD 25.36: Prompting For The Win

Some very good ideas about prompting and more.

The keys to understanding economic headlines; China’s big flex; why you should never bet against America; “no” is not a complete sentence; Excel is not a good project management tool; team native AI tools win.

Go Commanders!

The Distilled Spirit

The Front Page

Important happenings in business, economics and the world.

📰 Understanding Economic Headlines (Nominal News)
We are inundated with catastrophic-sounding economic headlines every day. Here is a handy guide to make sense of what they actually mean through an effective three question filter.

The purpose of these three questions is to help in filtering out poor analysis and meaningless headlines. Social media and news headlines often go for the dramatic rather than the insightful.

📈 A Boring Theory of the Populist Right (Slow Boring )
Right wing populism is surging. Elites are at a loss. What if it is more of a case of giving a large slice of customers what they want?

A simpler explanation is that a significant minority of the public in most Western countries agrees with right-wing cultural politics.

💪 China’s Big Flex (The Bismarck Cables)
China hosted a grandiose military parade, with Vladimir Putin in attendance. They showed off impressive hardware and there is a lot of diplomatic posturing to unpack.

Collectively, these systems demonstrate that China now possesses the capability to credibly launch nuclear weapons from ground, air, and sea—the full nuclear triad.

⚙ Process Knowledge Underlies Development (Programmable Mutter)
Precision manufacturing is a lot harder than just getting the right equipment and the right raw materials; it cannot be described through quantitative data or made into an app. Apprenticeship, a lost art in the US, matters when you are building things.

But if Dan is right, we need to understand how to build up and maintain process knowledge, as an essential element of economic development, and even the good society. China has done pretty well at this, without necessarily planning to, but as Dan suggests in passing, it is less certain in its capacity to maintain it.

⏬ Decreasing US Population (Derek Thompson)
Starting in the 17th century through 2025, the US population has always been on an upward trajectory. A percipitous drop in immigration is to blame for the switch. It will have profound impact on the US economy if it continues.

America’s slowing population growth would soon become a big budget problem. In 1965, there were about 4 workers for every Social Security beneficiary. Today there are fewer than 3. By the end of the century, there could be fewer than 2.

🦅 Never Bet Against America (Uncharted Territories)
America has been gifted amazing geography. Thomas Puyeo enumerates the reasons with rich graphics. Maybe we can afford an own goal or two.

In a world that sees China climbing, and witnesses how the US shoots itself in the foot with stupid policies like tariffs, it’s easy to fear the US might be set aside as a have-been. But its geography makes it impossible: It will always be rich, and it will be impossible to physically threaten.

AI and Software

Big AI Picture

💬 ChatGPT Won the Chatbot Wars (Artificial Ignorance)
OpenAI shipped better and ChatGPT has orders of magnitude more users. But what happens next and who can knock it off the throne?

The pattern is becoming clear: if there's a digital task that can be broken down into concrete, reasonably manageable workflows - and if there's a way for AI companies to position themselves between you and that task while charging for the privilege - they'll likely take a swing at it.

👴 Could AI Offset the Silver Tsunami? (Azeem Azhar)
The Baby Boom is retiring en masse, potentially impacting productivity in many ways. Can AI make up for this gap?

However, history tells us that demographics are not destiny. It can be a factor, but it’s not fate. Technology (see charts below) has historically — and should again — exert a far larger influence on economic outcomes than birthrates.

Building and Prompting Better

🧞 Coding with Genies (Software Design: Tidy First?)
Reinforcing loops will change tools. The IDE is an invention of the bygone age, how will we replace it?

🕓 Do 4 Hours of Research in 20 Minutes (AI Adopters Club)
Perplexity is an amazingly powerful research tool, here is a very good guide on how to use it successfully.

👩‍💻 Claude Code for Non Coders (Future-Proof Your Career with AI)
Claude Code is an amazingly powerful tool that you can do a lot more than just code. It is a persistent, intelligent tool that can act upon the file system and run MCP servers and subtasks. It lets AI actually do the thing without copy and paste.

📂 Personalizing ChatGPT: Custom GPTs vs Projects (Lead With AI)
OpenAI gives you two ways to customize ChatGPT — Custom GPTs and Projects. Which one should you use when and why?

💰 5 Claude Prompts for Analyzing a Stock (Jimmy's Journal)
Claude does a great job of managing large context and sticking to the facts, making it a good stock analysis partner.

Working Better

Professional and procedural advice for working better.

Teaming and Communicating

✋ Say More than Just “No” (Wes Kao)
Setting boundaries is important, but the advice that “No is a complete sentence” takes it a bit too far.

If your colleague has LEGITIMATE BUSINESS REASONS to ask you to do X, and you simply turn around and say “no,” you will sound like a jerk.

🧮 Excel is Considered Harmful (The Influential Project Manager)
Excel is really an accounting tool, not a project management tool. There are many better things in 2025. Use them.

Excel was designed in 1983 for financial modeling by individuals. Construction projects are living, breathing ecosystems where information changes constantly and dozens of people need different views of the same data.

🏢 Team Native AI Tools Win (Work3 - The Future of Work)
AI is profoundly changing the way we work. Building a framework teams can safely experiment and build team native AI tools wins.

This model fundamentally shifts the focus from asking "who is our best AI user?" to the far more critical question: "how good is our team at using AI together?"

How To Guides

🗣 How to Give a Good Talk (SigPlan)
The components of a good technical talk are worth repeating.

🗃 How To Get Organized this Fall (Jacqueline Nesi, PhD)
School is back, work is off summer holiday. It is time to get organized. Here are some ideas to getting your family organized this fall.

✍ How to Make Your Writing C.R.I.S.P. (Dan Hockenmaier)
A structure for writing a six page brief that includes context, requirements, insight, solutions and proof. Includes templates.

Fun Things

👶 The Nevermind Baby (The Gen X Jukebox)
Spencer Elden's 15 minutes came early — he was the baby on the cover of Nevermind. He has not stopped chasing that dollar bill.

🤘 Gen-X is Loud and Proud and a Bit Feral (The Hot Dog Cart)
101 reasons why Gen X leads the world in FAFO.

💎 Fordite (Why is this interesting?)
Painting cars used to create mounds of paint overspray. The layers of paint made these beautiful agates. They are real gems of an industrial sort.

🔊 The Story of Creative Technology (Abort Retry Fail)
Creative was computer sound in my formative years. Motherboard sound took over, eroding their core market, but the company endures selling specialized audio products.

💲 Saquon the Investor (The Profile)
When he is not breaking tackles, Saquon Barkley is investing in startups.

The Look

Are we in a housing bubble? Is there an emergency? Bruce Mehlman looks at it in six charts.

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