These are some questions to ask yourself to understand how you work. It might also be helpful when interacting with, improving, and redesigning AI.

I wrote this back in February 2025. I am expanding on these questions.

How do you respond?

What is one response you have made today?

Can all our responses be modeled as a next token prediction? What is a token? Are we all just next token predictors?

What do you actually respond with? Is it just words that you speak? Are you aware of all your outputs?

What do you respond on? What exactly are the inputs? Are you aware of the inputs?

How do you reason?

What did you reason today?

Why do you even reason? Why do you skip reasoning? Do you take shortcuts when reasoning?

Is your reasoning really correct, and did you arrive at an acceptable answer with wrong reasoning?

Did you initially have an answer in mind? Is the reasoning merely a process to justify the initial answer, and would reasoning have changed your judgment in this case?

Are you aware of all your reasoning?

Who is the reasoning for?

How do you evaluate what is good?

What did you reflect on today?

Given two responses, do you know which one is better?

Why is one response better? If one is better, which part of the response is better?

You don’t get feedback. How then do you determine what is good?

The feedback given is vague, late, or maybe even wrong. Then, how do you determine what is good?

How do you learn?

What did you learn today?

What are you learning? What exactly is the content you are learning? Is it a fact, a process, or something else?

How do you behave differently before and after learning? Will you now respond differently given the same context? How about similar contexts?

Are there unintended consequences from learning something? Are you aware of these effects? How do you contain these effects?

How do you check whether you have actually learned?

What do you value?

What did you do today?

How do you choose what to do? Is it just money, or something else?

Do you like what are you doing? What are you doing something that you do not like?

What do you find fun? Why do you find it fun? What are you naturally curious about?

What do you regret doing? Why are you still repeatedly doing that?

How do you lead?

Did you ask someone else to do something today?

How do you run an organization? How do you know that you are running the organization correctly?

How would you hire? What are the characteristics of the people you want to hire?

How much information do you share? Why do you share or not share certain information?

How much awareness do you want over the actions of your hires? When do you need to verify?

What do you manage - the process or the results? When do you choose what to manage?

How do you assign rewards to your hires?