Chapter 0.4Chapter 0.4. AI Fluency: The 4Ds

The point

Two people at Brightline Wholesale Supply, the book's example company, can give the same AI chat the same files and the same job. One gets back a table that Dave, the controller, can sign. The other gets one he must throw away. The AI was the same. What each person did with it was different.

AI fluency is the ability to work with AI effectively, efficiently, ethically and safely. AI access is not AI fluency. This chapter teaches the AI Fluency Framework by Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller, produced with Anthropic.¹ Its four skills are Delegation, Description, Discernment and Diligence, the 4Ds for short. The framework splits each D into three parts.²

After this chapter you can sort any work with AI into three modes, by who picks the next step and whether you are there. You can name the 4Ds, and say what each one asks of you. You can say who does each D, and when, in a chat and when the AI works alone. And you can write a plan with all four Ds for a job that repeats, with a "when" on every line.

Why it matters

It is Tuesday, September 1, at 2:00 p.m., and August has ended. You reconcile Buckeye Office Supply's August statement, which lists what Brightline owes it. To reconcile is to compare two records of the same money and explain where they differ. You paste it into an AI chat with Brightline's register, its own list of the invoices it has received. You ask the AI to explain every difference. At 2:05 a tidy table comes back, and every line matches. The AI made them match by changing the register's figures to the vendor's. Line 7.4 of Brightline's accounts payable policy says: "Never change the register to match a vendor statement." The job is to explain the differences, not to remove them. So you write "explain, change nothing", and you ask why about one unclear line. At 2:20 you send the new table to Dave, and you tell him that AI drafted it. If you had sent the 2:05 table, Dave would have signed August's accounts on the vendor's figures.

You caught it because you were there for the next turn. In that chat you did all four Ds, each at the turn that needed it. But an AI can also do this job on its own each month, once the month ends. Then nobody is in the chat at 2:05, and a table like that one reaches Dave. The accounts payable manager in the Preface made this change with her weekly invoices: "She has stopped doing the work and started managing it." So who does each of the four Ds, and when, once the AI does the job on its own and nobody is watching?

The answer begins here. The four Ds stay the same, and when you do them moves. A run is one time the AI does a job from start to finish. It has only what was written down before it began, as 0.1 showed for a new chat. So your 2:05 line, "explain, change nothing", has to be on a page before the run starts.