Ask Good Questions
Practical guidance for people who use AI seriously.
Better questions produce better results. This site is built around that idea. Not prompt tricks, not hype, not benchmarks. Structured thinking, real workflows, and field-tested lessons from someone who uses these tools under load every day.
The Guides are the lessons. The Field Notes are the stories of how I learned them.
- Charles Edmonds
Recent Guides
See allThe AI Junk Drawer Problem
One of the easiest ways to make AI less effective is to keep helping it without ever cleaning up.
A rule here.
A reminder there.
A style note.
A project file.
A lessons-learned document.
A copied block from an earlier session because it worked once.
Another warning because the AI missed some…
When AI Defaults to Newer, Better, Faster
If you work with AI long enough, you begin to notice a pattern that is easy to miss at first.
When a task is under-specified, AI tends to lean toward what looks like progress. A newer library. A cleaner rewrite. A more modern approach. A faster path. A more abstract design. A toolchain upgrade. Cr…
Losing the Big Picture
If you work with AI long enough, you will eventually run into a frustrating pattern: the code is improving, but the design is getting harder to reason about.
It usually happens one fix at a time.
You start with a real goal. The AI helps you get most of the way there. Then edge cases show up, so…
Recent Field Notes
See allWhen our AI workflow became a junk drawer
I ran into this recently on a fairly involved software project where we were using AI heavily across multiple stages of the work.
The project had real complexity. Existing constraints. Existing conventions. Edge cases. Integration points. Output expectations. The sort of work where you do not want…
The Moment I Realized the AI Needed the Rules First
I ran into this in a session that started out harmlessly enough.
The AI and I were discussing one of my projects in general terms. Caught up in one of the ideas, I let the conversation slide into actual implementation work without first loading the normal startup guidance, the repository rules, an…
The Moment I Realized I Was Losing the Big Picture
I ran into this while working on an older control we were trying to improve without replacing outright.
The approach was to layer newer behavior on top of legacy behavior. At first, that worked pretty well. We got the main behavior mostly where we wanted it, and AI helped move things forward quick…
Working on Real Programmers Use AI, a practical book for developers who want to use AI without losing control of their work. The guides and field notes here are drawn from the same material.