Insight
Ask Anything Was Asking Too Much
Every chat-based product opens with an empty box and a promise: ask anything. The stronger move is to open with an answer — because the blank prompt hands the hardest part of the job, knowing what to ask, to the person least equipped to do it.
The blank box
The opening screen of almost every AI product: a greeting, an empty field, a blinking cursor. All the capability sits behind a question the person hasn't formed yet.
Answer first
The same screen opened with a compiled answer — what changed, what matters, what to do next — and the text field demoted to a reply. Capability is shown, not described.
A producer opens the tool and the screen greets them: "Ask me anything about your book." They know something happened; they don't have the words to ask for it yet. Suggested prompts help — they at least hint at what the thing can do — but they still make the producer choose before they've seen anything.
Luke Wroblewski wrote about this. He'd noticed one question on Ask LukeW kept producing something useful on its own, so he stopped waiting for people to ask it: a daily, auto-compiled answer now sits above the suggested questions, and people get something to read or respond to without typing a word. I agree with him, and I'd push it one step further. This isn't a chat nicety. It's the fix for the biggest unsolved problem in AI products — nobody can tell what the thing can do until they've already guessed right.
The naive fix is more onboarding — tooltips, example prompts, a tour. It fails because it describes capability instead of exercising it. The stronger move is for the product to run its own best first question and show the result: what changed, what matters, what to do next. Put that producer back in front of the tool and open it on an answer instead of a blank field, and the box is still there — they just read it before they type into it.
I don't know yet which question a product should run first when the work is this varied, and I suspect picking wrong costs more trust than the blank box ever did.