Your AI writes for the smartest person in the room

Notice who AI writes for by default. It writes for someone who already understands the topic. Dense, complete, technically correct, and close to useless for the actual reader who's meeting the thing for the first time. i catch it instantly, because i spend my days writing for people who don't know the thing yet.

The fix isn't "make it simpler." That just flattens everything into baby talk and strips out the parts that mattered. The fix is telling the model who's reading and what they don't know.

The habit: before you ask for any explainer, write one line about the reader. "This is for a new hire who's never seen our tools and is a little nervous about asking a dumb question." Watch what changes. The model stops performing competence and starts actually teaching.

We spend so much energy telling the AI who it is. The bigger lever is telling it who it's talking to.

When you ask for an explanation, do you ever tell the model who's going to read it?

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Your AI writes for the smartest person in the room