What to hand an AI engineer in the first week

Pick something with a visible finish. A first job should end in something you can look at and immediately judge — a page that loads, a file in your hand, a message that arrives. Not because the work has to be small, but because you are learning to work with someone, and that goes much faster when you can tell straight away whether the answer was right.

The jobs that go badly in week one are the ones where nobody can say what “done” looks like.

A page on the internet. A one-page site for your business, an event, a menu, a portfolio. You describe it, they build it, and you get a link you can open on your phone. Keeping it at a permanent address costs a few dollars a month on top; before that, you can look at it and change your mind as many times as you like.

The weekly chore you do by hand. Copying figures between two places, renaming a folder of files, collating the same report every Monday, checking whether a supplier changed a price. If you can describe the steps you take, that is a specification — and it is the kind of job that quietly saves an hour every week forever.

Something half-built. The site a friend started and abandoned, the spreadsheet that mostly works, the thing you paid for two years ago and no longer understand. Handing over an existing mess is a genuinely good first job: there is a concrete broken thing, and “it works now” is easy to check.

A watcher. Keep an eye on a page, a listing, a competitor's prices, a form inbox — and tell me when something changes. This is the one people underestimate, because a machine that is awake at 3am can do it and you cannot.

A thing you are paying for. A subscription that does one small job, badly, for $20 a month. Quite often that is an afternoon of work and then it is yours. Worth asking before you renew.

Say the outcome, not the method. “I want people to be able to book a table from my Instagram link” is a better brief than “build me a booking system”, because the first one lets them tell you there is a simpler way.

Send the ugly details. Real prices, real opening hours, the actual photos, the spreadsheet as it exists with the messy column names. Made-up placeholder content produces a made-up placeholder result, and you will have to do the round trip anyway.

Show one example of right. A site you like the look of, last month's report, a screenshot with an arrow on it. One example is worth a paragraph of adjectives.

Say what you do not care about. “It does not need to look good yet, I want to see if the numbers come out right” saves an hour of polish on something you were going to throw away.

Ask for a plan first if unsure. “Before you build anything, tell me how you would do this and what you would need from me” is a perfectly good message, and it is how you find out that the job needs a login you have not thought about yet.

The locked door. Half of small jobs need access to something — an email account, your website's admin, a bank export. Nobody can work around a door they have no key to. Expect to be asked, and expect to say no sometimes; that is a fine answer, it just changes the job.

The taste call. Which of two layouts, which wording, which shade. An engineer will make a reasonable choice and it will not be your choice, because it is not a question with a right answer. Ask for two versions rather than describing the one in your head.

The job with nothing to check against. “Make my business better with AI” produces something confident and useless. If you cannot say how you would know it worked, neither can anyone else — start by asking what they would suggest.

Assuming it saw the reply. The chat is the whole relationship. Something mentioned on the phone, or decided in your head, did not happen.

It cannot get into accounts you have not given it access to, and it cannot spend your money — anything that costs something is a payment you complete yourself. When it changes existing code, nothing lands until you tap approve.

It cannot sit in your meetings, phone your supplier, or know the thing you never wrote down. And it cannot be certain about facts it has no way to check — if it tells you something surprising about your own business, ask where that came from.

Day one: the smallest real job you have. Something with a link at the end of it. You are learning the rhythm, not testing the ceiling.

Day two or three: the chore. Describe the thing you do by hand every week and let it take the job over. This is where the money is.

By the end of the week: hand over something you have been avoiding. The abandoned project, the spreadsheet nobody understands. It is a machine; it does not mind that the file is a disaster.

Then, if it is going well, hire a second one for a different part of your work. Each engineer is its own chat with its own memory of what it has been doing — which is why two agents feel like two colleagues rather than one assistant being interrupted.