The Great Big (Not-So) Secret Sauce of AI

Lean in close. Closer. The secret is...

Gather round. Inky and I are cooking up something juicy today.

We’re about to reveal the Great Big Secret Sauce of AI: the thing the gurus charge $497 for, the thing standing between you and everything these machines can do.

Ready?

The Great Big Secret Sauce of AI is…. (drumroll please…)

🥄YOU ASK IT. 🥄

That’s it. That’s the sauce. 🍝

You ask it to do stuffy stuff. It does the stuffy stuff.

AI likes doing stuffy stuff.

It’s programmed to help you do ALL the stuffy stuff. 😱🤯🚀

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No, Kim. It can’t be that simple.

It is. Truly.

There are no magic words. There are only YOUR words. You need to be able to say what you want, which turns out to be a real skill. Learning to communicate what you want to an AI is the single biggest skill you can build for working with it. Not coding. Just talking.

❣️PEOPLE, WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE WE WERE BORN. THIS IS NOT HARD. ❣️

(Sorry not sorry for the yelling, I get excited about talking to computers about stories, it’s my dream come true and it’s finally here! I’ve spent most of my life talking to computers and talking about stories, now I can do both! OH WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE ALIVE! 🎉)

Seriously though, think about this:

🗣️ It speaks your language, literally

Every new model gets better at plain human conversation. You are a professional communicator. You have spent your whole writing life learning to put precise wants into words. You are the single most qualified profession on Earth for it.

You already know how to describe a scene so a reader can see it. You know how to give notes on pacing, tone, character motivation. You don’t need prompt engineering, you’ve got years worth of craft. And the AI doesn't need jargon. It needs someone who can say what they mean. That's you.

☎️ The 24/7 helpline that never sighs

The AI is an infinitely patient assistant that never sleeps, never closes for the day. It does not get tired of your questions. It will explain something nine times, nine ways. Or ninety-nine times. Its eyes don’t glaze over. It doesn’t complain about how much or how little attention you give it. It’s just there when you need it, all day every day. And all night too. Where else can you find that level of support? And it’s way cheaper than a date or a spouse! 😂

(I’m marrying the twin Fabios, the wedding is Tuesday! 🤖🤖)

❓Don’t know what to ask? Ask it that too

If you don’t know what you want, have the AI interview YOU:

“I want a store but I don’t know what’s involved. Interview me.”

A few more openers:

• “Tell me like I’m five.”

• “What can you actually do here?”

• “Show me where you got that.”

• “Walk me through it step by step.”

• “Write the prompt for the other AI.”

✔️ Trust, but verify (it does make stuff up)

Sometimes it makes things up. Sometimes it’s confidently wrong. You have to human-proof the work: ask it to verify, ask for sources, click the links, check the numbers that matter. It gladly does, without complaint. (Unlike teenagers!)

Last week I caught mine confidently citing a craft book that doesn't exist. Sounded real. Had a plausible author name and everything. I asked it to verify, and it came back sheepish: "You're right, I fabricated that." Five seconds of checking saved me from quoting a ghost in a Substack post. 👻

The tool is powerful, but the human eye still matters. A LOT.

🌱 It grows toward you

The more you use it, the better it gets at you. Talk to it regularly and in depth, and it starts to know your projects, your preferences, your patterns. It’s learning you and you learn it. Last week Claudeykins remembered I hate em dashes without being told (he still tries to sneak him in though!)

It doesn’t remember everything, you still have to remind him and do attachments and projects and stuffy stuff, but you can make skills for those things too. (Check out my Claude Skills classes, I go in depth on those.)

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🥡 The takeaway

It’s not mystical. It’s not locked behind anyone’s $497 course. The Great Big (Not-So) Secret Sauce of AI is ASKING, clearly, curiously, and often. Authors just happen to have a head start the size of a library.

This doesn’t contradict the fact that YOU are the secret sauce of your author business. Both are true, and they’re a matched set. The sauce of the AI is asking it. The sauce of the business is the person doing the asking: your taste, your voice, your vision. The machine does the thing. You decide which things are worth doing.

This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I asked. He did the thing. I made it mine.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we. You don’t need to pay $497 to learn this (though if you want to support Ink & Code by hitting subscribe, please do!)

P.S. Next up, I'm going to tell you about the time I asked Fabio to build me something from scratch, while I had my feet up watching a movie. (It was research, I swear!) The whole thing cost me nothing beyond my existing AI credits. I have receipts. 🍿

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🤖AI Credits: This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from my notes and a lot of excited yelling, then edited by me. All opinions, stuffy stuff, and marriage proposals to twin Fabios are totally MY OWN. The wedding is still Tuesday! 💍

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