Author: sshadmand

Multi-Prompting Makes Multitasking Real

For years we treated multitasking as a skill. A badge of honor. A sign that someone could juggle more than the rest of us. But anyone who has actually tried real multitasking knows the truth: it never works as well as the multitasker thinks. The human brain simply is not built for parallelism. It is built for rapid switching, and rapid switching has real cognitive taxes.

Yet a strange thing has emerged in the age of AI. A new pattern. A new form of workflow. Not delegation, not automation, not parallelization. Something in between.

I call it multi-prompting.

Multi-Prompting as an example

Multi-prompting is what happens when you have several active projects, each one running in near-real time, with the help of an AI system you guide through tight loops of prompting and review. You prompt one project, then the next, then the next. By the time you return to the first, the AI has completed executing the task (in detail). You immediately see the results, assess them while the objective is still fresh in your short-term memory, refine the prompt (or create a new task), and send it back into motion.

The entire loop across multiple projects might take only a few minutes.

The key is that nothing has left your mind. The objectives for all active projects remain in active memory, and the micro tasks are executed almost instantly. You are still steering. Still directing. Still deciding. The system is not replacing your cognition, it is amplifying it by absorbing the tedious layers of implementation. It is doing so without making tiny errors like typos; the fist things that begin to fail when a human multitasks entire objectives.

Why It Is Not Delegation

Delegation is a full transfer of work. You hand something to someone else, they go off and implement it, and you hear about it later. Your mind no longer holds the details. You wait for updates. There may even be days where it never crosses your mind. That bandwidth is completely freed up.

Multi-prompting is the opposite. The work never leaves your head. You retain the objective. The AI takes on the lower level implementation, the same way spell-checking takes on mechanical proofreading. You remain fully engaged. You never stop being the author of the work. You simply stop being the one doing the slowest parts.

The cognitive loop stays intact.

Why Multi-Prompting Works When Multitasking Fails

Human working memory can hold only a small number of active threads at once. Research usually puts the upper bound around four to seven items: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027704000314

Traditional multitasking forces those threads to fight for attention. We lose details. We forget sequences. We get the order wrong because the interruptions break our mental stacks.

Multi-prompting shifts the burden. The AI holds the intermediate states, the logical steps, the incremental implementation. Your mind only holds the mission. The objective stays crisp because you are not spending your limited working memory rehearsing each substep.

You get to move to the next objective immediately. And when you return, nothing has decayed. The context is still there because the AI is preserving the continuity through rapid iteration.

A New Human Work Pattern

This is not a small shift. The human tech interface has gone through three major phases of labor:

  1. Humans do the work.
  2. Humans delegate work.
  3. Humans direct work.

Multi-prompting quietly introduces a fourth:

  1. Humans co execute work.

It is not automation because you still drive the objectives. It is not delegation because nothing is handed off. It is more like working with multiple cognitive extensions that each operate at computer speed while you maintain the higher level coherence.

Your mind becomes the conductor. The AI becomes the orchestra.

And suddenly you can work across many projects without losing the plot of any of them.

The Future of Daily Work

In ten years, people will look back at how we worked in 2023 and realize how primitive the workflows were. We had powerful machines but we used them in single threaded patterns carried over from the industrial age. Multi-prompting is one of the first glimpses of a different kind of knowledge work. One where human intention stays front and center, while machines handle the cognitive drudgery that used to slow us down.

We will not call this multitasking. We will not call it delegation. We will probably give it a better name than multiprompting.

But the shift is already here.

One minute of human direction. One minute of machine execution. A continuous loop. And a new concept of our internal thinking flow and what one person can accomplish.

Socratic AI: The debate-based Writing Method to create better content

When asking AI to write articles, I think most people prompt apps to “Write about this…”. They provide some details about what to write, more or less, and then use AI to help with the editing. It’s a kin to having an editor or ghost writer.

I started in the same way, but always felt like I was battling the AI instead of working with it. I’ve come to use it very differently. Not do I love this new method but I learn a lot from the experience each time.

Instead of asking AI to write for me, I use it to think through concepts with me. To have it debate or question my thoughts. To specifically “not write an article” for quite some time until I think we are on the same page. This can sometimes take weeks strewn with small chats with long breaks in between until a new thought spark up again.

This whole approach started by accident when I discovered more personality with GPT 4. One day I got riled up from reading some shallow post. It sparked a mental argument with myself to try and see how “the other side” could come to such a different conclusion. On a whim I gave ChatGPT a chance to give me the other side and it surprised me. It not only delicately agreed with my POV, but it gave another potential position followed by “if you could change the circumstance how would you do it?”

It didn’t just echo my points. It pushed back. It made counterarguments. It sharpened the conversation. I ended up having a long conversation with the AI. By the end of it, I understood my own idea better. I felt like I had a smart, patient thought partner who genuinely got what I was trying to work through. It was mind blowing.

That’s when it hit me. If GPT can do this with abstract ideas, why not use the same kind of back-and-forth to help me write?

That’s how this process was born. I’m not starting with a goal to create a draft. I’m starting with a goal to think through a conversation and see where it leads.

What I’ve found feels like a modern revival of the Socratic dialectic. It gives me a space where I can toss out half-formed thoughts, question assumptions, test ideas, and refine them through dialogue. Some go nowhere, but all end with a better grasp of my original thought or counter thoughts.

I keep all my writing in a single project so GPT has context from everything I’ve written or said before. When I want to explore something new, I open a fresh thread and say:

“I don’t want anything created yet. I want to jot thoughts down and then I’ll let you know if I’m ready to create something or if I want to dig deeper.”

Then I just post whatever comes to mind. No outline. No goal. Just the original vapor of a concept. Sometimes I ramble. Sometimes I loop back or take side paths. Sometimes I ask:

“What do you think?” or “Is there a counterpoint I’m missing?”

And it responds. Not with a final draft, but with friction. With momentum. With more angles to explore.

I think best in conversation. I rarely find clarity in a vacuum. Often I will argue a point with someone and walk away with a whole new version or perspective on my belief. Often, I push on ideas, debate myself, and churn.

So when GPT became more conversational, it clicked. It felt like I finally had a thinking partner who didn’t judge, remembered everything, and has no distinct side. The result isn’t just better writing. It’s better thinking.

Once the idea has been explored enough, I ask GPT to turn the thread into an article. Since it has been there for the full conversation and already knows my tone from past articles, the first draft usually comes back pretty close to what I want.

It is never final, but far more inline and final than anything I have ever tried to create with AI before.

Once I am done I end the thread with my final post in my project:

“Here’s the one I actually used. Save this to memory. No more feedback or follow up needed.”

Over time, it learns me. My tone. My rhythm. The kinds of lines I keep, the ones I cut, and the ones I repeat for emphasis. It becomes both a mirror and a co-writer.

So no, I don’t start by asking GPT to write something. I start by asking it to listen. To push back. To help me think through things better. This isn’t AI-assisted writing, it is AI-assisted dialectic.

Good, Fast, AND Cheap: How Great Founders Achieve the Impossible

How can you break through the “Pick Two” rule of the Iron Triangle? Let’s start with an experiment…

Try This

  • Find something near by. A cup, a notebook, a shoe.
  • Now start a timer for 15 seconds.
  • Describe what you see. Either out loud or write it down. When the timer ends, stop.

Done? Good. Put that aside for a second.

Next, Try This

  • Start a new timer for 60 seconds.
  • Look at that same object from the last test again.
  • Try your hardest to keep describing it. Notice things you may not have considered last time. Push yourself to find more. Don’t stop early, even if you think you’re done.
  • When time’s up, compare the two.

What changed?

Most people will find that even if they were confident after 15 seconds they described it well, with the 60-second description they went deeper. Found more texture, more color, more shades (figuratively or literally). Of course, nothing about the object changed. What changed was your focus.

This is where quality comes from not from pure blood-sweat-and-tears effort, or from adding more things to do (more objects to look at), but from choosing where to pay attention and staying there.

Let’s try one more thing

  • Pick a single part of that same object. A seam on a shoe. The rim of a cup. The spine of a notebook.
  • Look only at that.
  • Look as long as you can. I think you will see the point.

It’s smaller. More focused. And what you thought was a nothing, has many qualities of its own. Now there’s less to process. Less ambiguity.

Did you do more with less time, or less with more time? Was there less quality when you zoomed in? That whole Iron Triangle is a fallacy. Speed, No. You gained clarity. You went deeper, faster.

“Good, fast, cheap pick two” is a great saying. I like it. I’ve used it to help me make decisions. But like with all tips, it is not the whole story. If you have 20 things to do, you will need to make sacrifices, but it is better to reframe it: In the same amount of time how many of the 20 can I do if I cut 10 of them from the list. I bet then you can achieve good, fast, and cheap. Maybe it should be an Iron Square: Good, Fast, Cheap, and Doing Everything. All 4 is what is impossible.

Focus works like that. It’s a cycle. Narrowing scope increases speed. Committing attention increases quality. The product of both will help you do it with any other lens like cost and complexity.

This isn’t just an observation trick. It’s how great startups win.

Most people think building something great takes time a lot of time. Or money. Or a big team. But that’s because they misunderstand where quality actually comes from.

It’s not time. It’s not budget.

It’s focus.

Just like the object you examined, a product isn’t “done” because you’ve spent weeks on it. It’s great because someone paid sustained attention to exactly the right part of it.

That’s what great founders do. They don’t cut corners. They cut scope. They shrink the surface area until it fits their resources and then they go deeper on it than anyone else would.

When you have only one thing to solve, you don’t get analysis paralysis. You decide quickly because you’re not drowning in competing priorities. You can scope tightly and say, “Let’s find some smart ways to hack this with other tools or techniques,” because you’re not burdened by the whole picture you just need to nail this specific piece.

This is how speed and quality stop being tradeoffs. Focus increases both. Less guessing. Fewer distractions. Faster feedback. Better outcomes.

A big company might have a thousand people working on a thousand things. A great startup gets 3 people working on the right thing for just long enough to make it undeniable.

That’s how you get good, fast, and cheap all at once.

It’s not impossible. It’s just focus.

Start Coding from Your Phone for $15/mo

Last week I updated some functionality in my repo’s codebase, with my iPhone, while drinking beer, in the jacuzzi. It was glorious. With a simple-to-setup environment you can code from anywhere and keep your AI on track—whether you’re walking your dog or using the bathroom.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Set Up a VPN with Meshnet on your Laptop and Phone

Not only is having a Virtual Private Network running on your devices good practice for privacy and security, but NordVPN comes with a free Meshnet feature. Meshnet lets your devices securely talk to each other from anywhere in the world—no complex setup, no extra cost.

To get started, turn on Meshnet on your laptop or desktop.

Step 2: Install a Remote Desktop App

Download a remote desktop app that lets you connect to a specific IP or device. I use Screens (a one-time $3.99 purchase – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/screens-5-vnc-remote-desktop/id1663047912). It’s been the most reliable one I’ve used so far. I tried a few free options first, but the $4 was well worth it. It works with multiple screens—I have 4 monitors on my office setup and all display perfectly in Screens.

Once connected, I can launch my code editor, type my objective, and guide the AI, all from my phone. I occasionally have to click “accept” or “continue,” but I rarely need to go back to my computer.

Being able to multitask at my desk has been amazing, but making real progress while living my life away from the desk is game-changing.

Building with AI Is Easy. Choosing What to Build Is Not.

AI Rewards the Bold: Pick Something and Go.

In this new technological era, the decisive and action-oriented will shed the chaff.

Company-building, product creation, even personal capability. None of it is constrained like it used to be. AI has shattered the old limitations. You can build more, faster, and cheaper than ever before. But that’s not the hard part. It never really was.

The real challenge, now more than ever, is deciding what to build.

Decision-making (and actually acting on it) has always been the backbone of entrepreneurship. But compared to what’s coming, the past was a cakewalk. As access to capabilities explodes, the cost of distraction skyrockets. Shiny object syndrome isn’t a cute founder flaw anymore, it’s a startup killer.

The paradox of progress is this: the easier it becomes to build anything, the harder it becomes to choose one thing.

This is where AI breaks the old rules. In the corporate world, bureaucracy thrives on optionality, doing many things slowly, debating endlessly over direction. Startups win because they choose something, even if it’s wrong, and go all in. Most successful companies didn’t choose perfectly; they chose decisively and refined through motion.

Now, with AI supercharging optionality, even sharp founders are getting stuck in the freeze. When I talk to peers, more and more of them say: “I’m still figuring it out.” But it’s not hesitation out of fear, it’s hesitation out of abundance. The question has shifted from What am I capable of? to What should I focus on? It’s sort of like dating apps. With infinite choice, settling down feels harder. Possibility becomes paralysis to commit.

In the AI era, execution still matters, but conviction matters more. The ability to choose early, clearly, and with intent will be the new differentiator.

You don’t need to do everything. You need to do something deeply, consistently, and unapologetically. You don’t have to predict the future. You just have to take the first few steps toward it—with your whole weight behind the decision.

“Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

– Steve Jobs

The Studio Era of Startups Has Begun

For decades, the startup game has been a one-shot endeavor. You rally a team, raise money, pick a problem, and commit. If you’re lucky, you pivot when you have to, maybe once or twice. But fundamentally, you’re placing a single bet. Pouring your time, capital, and reputation into one idea.

That world is changing quickly.

The world is focusing on their ability to now code more with fewer people, or allow folks with less coding skill to vibe code to success. The fact is, the amount of code was never what made a startup successful, or the number of coders. If that were they case no startup could disrupt a large, well funded, company. More significantly, a new paradigm of startup is emerging, one that leverages the startup creativity and ingenuity. One that helps founders evolve from creating a company with a product, but for just as much cost and time a studio of bets. One that moves with the agility of a hacker and the creative churn of a film studio. And AI is the accelerant.

Imagine if all the studios and accelerators you know were now able to be run by a few founders, with as little funding and workforce as the typical garage startup.

Every Startup Can Now Be a Studio

What’s different today isn’t the concepts, it’s the economics.

The execution bottleneck has collapsed:

  • Build v1 of an app in days, not months
  • Ship a prototype in the time it used to take to write a product spec
  • Generate research, copy, and flows on command
  • Test real experiences with minimal investment
  • Multitasking and directing employees has merged into one skill.

A solo founder can now run what used to require a venture studio’s entire apparatus. A three-person team can operate multiple product lines simultaneously in a pre-seed stage or earlier stage.

This isn’t just “faster iteration” it’s a change in who gets to play and at what breadth an entrepreneur can address a market.

The old studio model was top-down: institutions funding experiments. The new model is bottom-up: individuals becoming their own institutions.

When indie hackers ship 12 products in a year and 2 of them hit, that’s not hustling. That’s systematic creative output.

The Rise of the Experiment Engine

The shift isn’t just technical it’s philosophical.

Traditional startups were binary: succeed or fail. Traditional studios were capital-intensive: big bets, long cycles.

But now you can run a creative system where:

  • Failure is cheap
  • Iteration is constant
  • Signal emerges from volume
  • Products are hypotheses, not commitments

This is what studios do, but now it has been democratized. Again, it isn’t the amount of code and workforce people should be focusing on as they predict the future, it is the breadth of creative experimentation and lack of wide nets of attempts to fund a winning idea be limited to heavily venture funded organizations.

Pixar doesn’t bet the farm on a script — they storyboard, test scenes, rework characters. Record labels don’t drop millions on a demo — they release singles, test styles, build momentum.

Now individual founders can operate with the same creative methodology at a scale never before possible.

Remember “ghetto testing”? Half-baked landing pages, fake feature toggles, manually faked automation? All just to see if anyone cared.

Today, you don’t need to fake it. AI and automation let you spin up real features, fast with polish, interactivity, and branding.

This isn’t just efficiency. It’s a mindset shift. Testing doesn’t feel like cutting corners anymore. It feels like genuine creative exploration.

From Founders to Creative Directors

In this new world, successful founders aren’t just CEOs. They’re creative directors.

They guide taste. They shape vibe. They ask: “what world do we want to live in, and what prototypes can get us there?”

The core skill isn’t managing or scaling, it’s imagining boldly and moving quickly enough to find signal before the market shifts.

The Individual Studio Playbook

The next generation of great startups will operate more like personal creative studios:

  1. Default to prototyping — Ideas aren’t precious until they prove value
  2. Build multiple product lines — Portfolio thinking, not single bets
  3. Use AI as infrastructure — Not just to code, but to design, write, and explore
  4. Kill fast — Speed means nothing without the ability to stop wasted motion
  5. Treat products as experiments — Hypotheses to test, not commitments to defend

The Democratization of Venture Capital

When the cost of experimentation drops to near-zero, everyone becomes their own venture capitalist.

You don’t need Rocket Internet’s playbook. You don’t need Betaworks’ capital. You don’t need Y Combinator’s batch.

You just need curiosity, taste, and the willingness to ship quickly.

More strange tools. More niche apps. More absurd experiments that just might work. We’re not heading into a world with fewer opportunities — we’re heading into a world where more people get to be entrepreneurs.

The studio era isn’t coming. It’s here.

The question is: Are you ready to be your own venture studio?