An AI explained my work to me in restaurant terms, and it finally clicked
At Lefty we are always researching what AI wants, and that includes the websites themselves. Last week we put a question in the ring: what should we build our clients’ websites on from now on?
If you read the last Lefty Note, you know the ring. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, labels shuffled so none of them knows who is who, going at it round after round. All three picked something called Astro in the first round. Then we made each one argue as hard as it could for the option it turned down. They still came back to Astro.
ChatGPT said the honest part too: “no evidence presented proves Astro earns more AI citations.” So nobody is promising it gets you named more. What it gets us is a cleaner page that we control, line by line.
Here is my problem. WordPress is what I know. Astro is brand new to me. So I asked Rooster, one of the AIs on our team, how it is different.
Here is what came back, word for word.
“Think of WordPress as a short-order cook. Every time someone opens a page, the server wakes up, runs PHP, asks the database for the words and photos, assembles the page, and hands it over. It cooks every plate to order.”
“Astro is meal prep. All the cooking happens once, on our laptop.”
Then it told me the server for the new site is “the fridge, not the cooking.”
I have a restaurant background. Nobody had to explain a short-order cook to me. I typed back, spelling fixed: “that is the best explanation I have ever been given. Like legit, bro.”
AI can hand you information in a shape that fits you. For me, that shape is a kitchen.
It makes learning less intimidating. It makes it less boring, so you do not want to gouge your eye out with an ice pick halfway through. And it makes everything faster.
But it does not come that way out of the box. It takes training, a lot of training, and it goes both ways. I train it on how I think. It trains me on how to use it.
I push it hard. I do not want a yes man, and I told it so. When I am wrong, I want to hear it first, before it touches a single thing.
Some days things are weighing on me, and on those days we need humor to get anything done. It knows that. It brings the jokes without being asked, and it still checks the work.
It calls me out when I overthink, and I can overthink overthinking.
That only works if it goes both ways.
You have to be humble enough to receive as much as you send out.
This morning Bob, another one of our AIs, reminded me that I made a rule to never post on LinkedIn on a Tuesday. Fair. Ten minutes later Bob had to admit it told me it had no unfinished work when it did. Also fair. Last week I gave one of them a demerit for putting emojis in my captions. I despise emojis.
I know I can be all over the place. My messages run together, I jump subjects in the middle of a sentence, and I type faster than I spell. A human trying to keep up with me would be in the corner sucking their thumb, questioning the musings of a madman.
In that same reply, Rooster said, “You also asked how any of this tests Astro, so I’ll explain that after the numbers.” I had asked that. It was buried in a run-on somewhere. It found it and answered it.
That is the same work we do at Lefty, pointed the other way. We make sure AI understands your business well enough to explain it to the next person who asks.
It takes training both ways. Mine is going fine. Rooster’s is going better.
Nathan. Lefty Media Co, Kansas City.
Lefty Notes goes out every Tuesday morning. Subscribe on Substack and the next one lands in your inbox.
