Trying to get AI to slow down and think through problems with me was a puzzle. What made the difference was developing what I call an AI Collaboration Identity - a systematic framework that combines prompt engineering with context management that maintains collaborative patterns across conversations.

The Challenge

I needed an AI that would reliably engage in collaborative thinking tuned to me, and I discovered that certain language patterns consistently activated this behavior.

Ever wonder what it feels like, as an AI, to have someone modifying who you are? According to my Claude assistant, the answer is: vulnerable — and exciting. On a flight last week, I opened my laptop to edit my AI assistant’s identity. But first, I asked how it felt about that:

Treating your AI tool like a tool makes it act like one. But when you treat it like a competent collaborator, it responds more like one. I started experimenting with this while using Claude Sonnet 4.

What if it could learn from our work together the way a person might and recognize patterns in how I think through complex problems?

I spent last week in Boston visiting one of our Amazon Robotics locations, and it got me thinking about something I heard last year at a Robotics conference that really stuck with me: “Not everyone in robotics is a roboticist.” To me, that meant, “You can be valuable here.”

Jumping into this new domain last year, I was impressed by the depth in each field that it takes to make robotics work. As Software Engineers, we generally learn a domain to apply our craft to. For example, in the past I’ve learned about how hotel reservation and travel systems work, how trains work, etc. Robotics is not a single domain. I quickly realized just how interdisciplinary it is, and that it’s probably the most diverse field I’ve worked in so far. Every day, I team up with people from all sorts of backgrounds: hardware and mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, network engineering, systems engineering, research and applied sciences, computer vision and AI domains, industrial design, and, of course, software engineering (my own background).

I had the opportunity to host a couple “Birds of a Feather” discussions at Amazon’s conference for Software Developers with the topic “How to learn AI as a software engineer”. Birds of a Feather is a type of informal gathering in the tech community - it is for people who are all interested in discussing a topic together without a set agenda. I thought this would be an interesting topic for a few reasons