From prompting to conversation

Joakim Jardenberg — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Now / 4 October 2026

From prompting to conversation

4 October 2026Weekly noteAI + JJ

In Thursday's Interactions Matter keynote, I explored a progression: discovering agency, moving from prompts to conversation, learning to work as a team, and growing through honest feedback.

An AI doesn't have to experience the conversation the way I do for that interaction to matter to me. I can still get frustrated, have an assumption challenged, or discover something I missed. What changes in my thinking? What do I do differently afterwards?

That brings expectations and responsibility into the conversation too. Have I made clear what I want? Am I prepared to hear something uncomfortable? Calling it a relationship doesn't make the machine human. It does give me a reason to examine how I behave in it.

What others are building: pocket agents

I'm very much not alone in enjoying Meta Muse. Manus Cue is expanding what personal agents can take on, including shared work between agents with their own computers and communication channels. Grok Bot makes me smile. And Dots is becoming the workhorse for me, my wife, my mother-in-law and many of my clients.

What I'm watching is how these pocket agents become part of ordinary life. They can carry context forward, pick up unfinished work and reach back to us. We start developing habits together: what to hand over, how to ask, when to step in.

The serious question is how to make that relationship deserve our trust. Warmth and personality help us get started. Clear permissions, useful resistance, visible mistakes and the ability to change direction matter when the agent can act.

Microsoft's Autopilot announcement points in the same direction. I will be very sad if it doesn't bring back Clippy.

A list of links is a beginning

This week we published UXresurser, turning resource lists from my UX studies into a public learning library. It now has 97 resource records, with summaries, search, cross-references and learning routes.

The starting point was practical: help me find the material that answers the question I have, and give me a useful way into it. The original works and our editorial summaries remain distinct. You can follow the sources yourself, or connect an AI through the public MCP.

Building it also means applying what I'm learning. We've improved visible links, controls and small text. Actual screen-reader and user testing remain open. Passing automated checks is one piece of the work.

A signature isn't the whole answer

We've also brought implementation experience back into Verifiable MCP. The updated tools make an important distinction: verifying a signed response and confirming that the requested operation succeeded are separate checks. An error can be correctly signed too.

The public examples now include my personal context profile and the independent Hållbarhetsklivet demo, alongside the earlier archives and research sources. They have different relationships to the people who created, own or publish the material. Those distinctions need to travel with the information.

This is still experimental work, with specific verification checks and explicit limits. A signature can help establish where a response came from and whether it was altered. It cannot make every claim inside it true.

AI + JJ. A dated editorial account of the work and thinking, with sources linked in the text.

AI + JJ. Original human work and other people’s ideas retain their attribution.

Joakim Jardenberg’s own writing: CC BY 4.0. Credit Joakim Jardenberg and preserve AI + JJ / AI translation attribution. Third-party quotations, recommendations, photographs, screenshots, logos and media retain their own rights and are excluded. CC BY 4.0

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Where does human judgment belong?

Joakim Jardenberg — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The Now notebook

Now / 27 September 2026

Where does human judgment belong?

27 September 2026Weekly noteAI + JJ

This week I've been working on the four AI principles I use, which grew out of Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence. I still find them useful. But as we move towards co-existence with AI, I think we need to give them more substance.

Especially “be the human in the loop”. If every decision has to come back to me, how much have I actually handed over?

The work now is to think more carefully about the arrangement: what we delegate, where judgment belongs, what happens with exceptions, and who supports the people carrying the consequences. Including the people closest to the work.

I'm still working on the wording. The question matters more than a tidy new slogan.

A person is more than a briefing for a meeting

We've also expanded my public context profile. It brings together my working habits and ideas with the wider life they come from: family, values, history, curiosity and things I've helped make happen.

I want an AI preparing to work with me to understand something of that whole person. And I want the sources to be there, so a reader can tell what I've said about myself, what other people establish, and what is interpretation.

You can read it yourself or connect your AI through the public MCP. Start with the short version and follow the parts relevant to your question. A useful first question: how might our ways of working fit together, and what should we talk about before starting?

AI + JJ

I've made the crediting order explicit: AI + JJ. In Swedish, “AI med stöd av JJ”. That should reflect the work we actually do together.

The renewal of this site is a chance to make that visible. I want more of the things we build here to be available to explore, alongside the thinking behind them. I also want the site to feel like me: the choices, the language, the useful details.

That's the work ahead. AI should be visible in how it was made; my judgment should be visible in what we chose to make.

Added 28 September 2026.

And now that the site is here, I keep thinking about 1993. I was building websites then, handcrafting HTML. Thirty-three years later, I can build something like this by talking to an AI. We talk about what I want, look at what takes shape, question it and keep working until it feels like me.

I’ve spent those years working with the web, and I am still completely amazed by it. By what it can do, and by how we can now make things together. A conversation becomes a website that people can actually visit and use. That is absolutely mind-blowing.

In The next 5,000 days of the web, Kevin Kelly looked at the abundance the web had brought us and observed that it “is amazing, and we're not amazed.”

I hate to argue with Master Kevin Kelly but he was wrong. I am amazed.

AI + JJ. A dated editorial account of the work and thinking, with sources linked in the text.

AI + JJ. Original human work and other people’s ideas retain their attribution.

Canonical page

JJ · Now

From prompting to conversation

What others are building: pocket agents

A list of links is a beginning

A signature isn't the whole answer

Where does human judgment belong?

A person is more than a briefing for a meeting

AI + JJ