How to Make AI Your Toughest Teammate (medium.com)

Software engineer Anirudh Edpuganti lays out a practical playbook for turning generative AI from a convenience into a critical thinking partner he calls the “Idea Bouncer.” Instead of passively accepting polished outputs, he argues engineers should provoke models to surface assumptions, stress-test logic, and simulate real stakeholder pushback. The post catalogs nine concise prompt patterns—grouped into challenge & reframe (e.g., “Play devil’s advocate: give five reasons this plan might fail,” “List assumptions and rate confidence”), test & strengthen (role-play a skeptical stakeholder, design a 2‑week validation test, summarize the biggest risk in one sentence plus a mitigation), and expand perspective (offer three alternative approaches, run a pressure-test checklist of assumptions, failure modes, simplest test, stakeholder objections, weakest link). For the AI/ML community this matters because it addresses common failure modes—confirmation bias, erosion of critical thinking, and false confidence from well-phrased but shallow answers—and gives concrete, low-friction ways to mitigate them. The techniques emphasize cheap, testable experiments, clearer trade-off analysis, and better anticipation of objections, helping teams turn model outputs into iterated, defensible decisions rather than final verdicts. Practically, adopting these prompts can improve product launches, design trade-offs, and stakeholder communication while preserving human intellectual agency.