You Are the Bottleneck

Hey,

Last Thursday was W6: Stop Being the Bottleneck. Six workshops in, the series turned to the one job AI keeps handing back to you.

You Are the Bottleneck

Here is the pattern. AI handles the easy eighty percent. Drafts, summaries, rewrites. But the hard twenty percent still has your name on it. The reviews. The sign-offs. The "is this good enough" calls. The work piles up behind a single reviewer, and that reviewer is you.

W1 through W5 taught AI to produce. W6 taught it to evaluate, the way you evaluate. That is the jump that takes you out of the loop.

The fix is not a better tool. It is a prompt that runs your judgment for you. We built one live, a system that reviews a weekly status report the way you would. And the whole thing turned on one line most people get wrong.

Context is not background. Most people fill the Context block with filler ("you are a helpful assistant, here is some info"). Context is your standards. The checklist in your head. The things you actually check before you sign off. Encode that, and the hard twenty percent stops needing you every time.

Before / After

Same goal: stop reviewing everything yourself.

Before:

Review this weekly report and tell me if it is good.

After:

You are the senior reviewer who catches problems before anyone else. That person is me. Context: these are my standards, apply every one. Dashboard look. Numbers visible. Red, orange, or green signal on each KPI. One A4 page. Task: review this the way I would. Format: VERDICT in one line, ship it or fix these first or redo it, then problems worst-first.

The first asks for an opinion. The second ships a decision.

Take It Home

The full judgment-system prompt, the standards worksheet, and the verdict format fit on one page. Built straight from the W6 live demo, copy-paste ready.

Get the W6 Cheatsheet

If you joined W6 live, use your workshop email and it unlocks right away.

The recordings from W1 through W6 are up. Next Thursday, July 2, is the capstone: W7, Master Claude Code. Free and hands-on. Ship a real feature end-to-end in the terminal, from plan to passing tests to PR.

Save My Seat for W7

Reply if you want in.

Talk soon,

Merryl