THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hi Friend,

I spent the last month setting up a new community for the MacSparky audience. I'm not going to walk you through the build today. That's a piece for another week. What I want to tell you about is where the actual decisions came from.

I worked through option after option. Names, structures, pricing, rooms, access tiers, onboarding flow. By the end I had a draft set labeled A through H. Yes, eight versions. I went in deep.

Claude was useful for a lot of that. Skills, drafts, the small gears that turn busywork into something I could finish in a sitting. I'd describe what I needed and the robot cranked the wrenches for me. That part really did help.

The big decisions, though, didn't come from any of those eight drafts. They didn't come from any large language model. If anything, the models would have led me away from the answer.

The big decisions came from phone calls.

A call with Mike about which platform actually fits the audience. A call with Nick on whether to launch one community or two, which sounds tactical until you realize how completely it reshapes the next year of work. A few conversations with my biggest customers about what they actually wanted, in their own words, before I built around what I assumed they wanted.

Each of those calls reset something I had been confidently typing into Claude for days.

There's a reason for that. The people I called know me. They know the business. They know the audience. They had context the model doesn't have and won't ever have. The model is an amnesiac eager intern. Useful for donkey work. Hopeless at holding the picture of what I'm actually trying to do.

I'm not anti-AI here. I've spent years building Field Guides on this exact topic. The lesson from this experience is just that the model holds the shovel. You, in your guts, and your trusted human advisors hold the map.

So here's a question for you. What decision are you about to make on AI's advice that would change if you picked up the phone and asked someone who knows you?

Your pal,
David
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​Read this post on macsparky.com​

This Week in MacSparky Labs

Week two of the new betas gave the Labs plenty to put to the test. A few of the things members got this week:

• A hands-on test of Siri's enhanced dictation, head to head with Wispr Flow
• Building Shortcuts just by describing them out loud
• The Lab Report on the new Siri details, three real iPhone Mirroring upgrades, and a rumor pile that runs deep

That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.

The Human Side of a Good Book

This week's newsletter is sponsored by Shortform.

The piece above is about how AI handles the typing but humans hold the map. That's exactly where Shortform fits for me.

Shortform is built by a team of editors, not a language model. Real people read the books, pull the threads, and write the guides. In a world where AI-generated content is everywhere, that matters. You're getting a human take, not a synthesis of whatever the model was trained on.

The reading that's shaped how I think about AI and the people side of decision-making: I'd point you to their guides on books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, Never Split the Difference, and The Lean Startup. The interpersonal and the strategic, side by side.

If you've got a subject pulling at you, spend twenty minutes in Shortform before you commit to a stack of books. Sign up through my link (shortform.com/davidsparks) and you'll get a free trial and 25% off the annual plan.