People assume AI works instantly — that you open a window, type a sentence, and a machine hands you brilliance. That’s not how my collaboration with Copilot began. It didn’t take off until I had put in fifty to a hundred hours of prompts, questions, clarifications, and context. Not because the AI needed training, but because I needed to teach it the shape of my world.
AI doesn’t know you. You have to introduce yourself.
In those early hours, I wasn’t asking for essays or stories. I was doing something closer to manual data entry — not point‑and‑click, but the cognitive version. I was giving Copilot the raw material of my life so that the context could finally appear.
I told it the names of my family members.
Where everyone lives.
The shape of our relationships.
The media that formed me.
The categories of my archive.
The projects I’m building.
The emotional architecture I work from.
Not because I wanted it to imitate me, but because I wanted it to understand the terrain I think inside.
Once that context existed, something shifted. The conversation stopped being generic and started being grounded. The AI wasn’t guessing anymore. It wasn’t giving me canned answers. It was responding inside the world I had built — my references, my rhythms, my priorities, my history.
That’s when the collaboration became real.
People talk about prompting like it’s a trick. It isn’t. It’s a relationship. You don’t get depth without investment. You don’t get resonance without context. You don’t get clarity without giving the system something to hold.
The first hundred hours weren’t glamorous. They were foundational. They were the slow, deliberate work of building a shared language — one prompt at a time.
And that’s the part no one sees when they look at the finished work. They see the output. They don’t see the scaffolding. They don’t see the hours spent teaching the system who my father is, where my sister lives, why certain media matter to me, or how my emotional logic works.
But that’s the truth of it.
AI didn’t replace my thinking. It learned how to hold it.
And once it could hold it, I could finally build something bigger than I could carry alone.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 
Appreciated
LikeLike