I’ve now run enough sessions with senior people to have watched the same thing happen dozens of times, and it always goes the same way.

Someone opens a fresh window. They type in a rushed half-sentence of what they want. They hit enter, expecting a miracle. They get something generic and slightly wrong. And I can see the conclusion form on their face in real time: this is overrated, it doesn’t get me, the hype was a lie.

They are treating it like a vending machine. Coin in, miracle out. And when the miracle doesn’t drop, they kick the machine.

What they’re missing

The people who get extraordinary things out of these tools are not smarter or more technical. They just understand that a good output is not a single move. It is a sequence.

They research first. They let the tool go and gather the real material before asking it to produce anything. Then they plan. They shape the approach, argue with it, cut the bad ideas, before a single word of the final thing gets written. Only then do they generate, and even then they groom the output, give feedback, push it back, and shape it toward what they actually meant.

Research, then plan, then groom, then generate. Most people skip straight to generate and wonder why it feels like slop.

It is the difference between asking a stranger to write your keynote in one shot, and briefing a sharp assistant over the course of a morning. Same person. Wildly different result. The only variable is whether you treated it like a conversation or a vending machine.

Why smart people fall for it

Here is the strange part. The vending machine trap catches experienced people worst.

The reason is the interface lies to them. It looks like a search box, and they have twenty years of muscle memory that says a search box takes a short query and returns an answer. So they bring search-box behaviour to a tool that rewards the opposite, and their seniority actively works against them.

The junior person who never learned the search-box habit often gets better results, because they are willing to just… talk to it. Explain. Go back and forth. Treat it like a colleague rather than a machine that owes them an answer.

The unlock

If you take one thing from a session with me it is usually this. Slow down at the start. The quality of what you get out is set almost entirely by the quality of the setup, and the setup is the part everyone rushes.

It is closer to a very fast, very literal colleague who will do exactly what you actually asked, which is a problem only because you have not been asking properly.

The version you haven’t met yet

And there is a further step that most people don’t even know exists, because the vending machine framing hides it completely.

Everything so far still has you starting the interaction. You ask, it answers. Reactive. The version that actually changes how a company runs is the one that doesn’t wait for you at all. It runs on a schedule, or the moment something in your systems trips a wire. A metric crosses a line and it flags the owner with the reason and a suggested next step. An error spike happens at 3am and it pulls the logs, works out the likely cause, and leaves you a summary instead of a red light.

Same engine. The only difference is what sets it off: you, the clock, or the world. Most people never get past the first one because they are still standing at the vending machine waiting to be served, when they could have hired something that works while they sleep.

Stop kicking the machine. It was never a machine. Once that clicks, people stop telling me the tech is overrated. They start telling me they can’t remember how they worked before it. Nothing about the model changed between those two sentences. Only the way they reached for it did.