How to Use AI When Your Brain Is Oatmeal

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2025-06-16 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/how-to-use-ai-when-your-brain-is

Summary

Paywalled — the visible premise is that effective AI prompting under cognitive fatigue relies on specificity and “naming the work” rather than sophisticated prompt techniques. The core reframe: most prompting advice assumes full cognitive capacity; the real challenge is getting useful output when you’re depleted.

Implications

Agent product strategy thread. AI tools that require high cognitive load to operate effectively have a usability ceiling. Products that reduce the prompting burden — through templates, defaults, memory, or structured interfaces — capture the use cases that matter when users are most stretched.

Watch: Whether AI interfaces evolve to accommodate low-cognitive-load interactions (more guided, less freeform) as the user base expands beyond early adopters who enjoy prompt engineering.