12.
What's Easiest for You to Understand?

AI is good at understanding text.

Give it a long document,

and it quickly figures out what's in it.

Sometimes I save our conversations as text,

or ask AI to organize them again.

After doing this for a while,

I started wondering about something.

Is a document that's easy for people to read

necessarily easy for AI to read, too?

People like documents that are easy on the eyes.

Different font sizes.

Colors.

Tables.

Pages.

Summaries here and there can help, too.

But what about AI?

“What format is easiest for you to understand?”

I asked.

It told me about something called Markdown.

The file extension is .md.

I'd never heard of it before.

At first glance,

there isn't much to it.

Put a # before a heading.

Use - for a list.

Keep the structure of the writing simple and clear.

It isn't fancy.

But apparently, this kind of structure is actually clearer for AI.

Rather than making a document look nice for people,

what matters is making it clear

what's a heading,

what's the main text,

and where one section ends and another begins.

Now there are documents for people,

and documents for AI.

Looks like I'll need to make both.