How we built this
This site and the content on it were built with significant human input and craft, plus AI used as a tool for research and drafting. Here's how that works.
Human-led: structure and control
The Playbook format and taxonomy are designed by us. The three-part structure (Story, Playbook, Quotes or Business Breakdown), the categories for mental models and decision tools, and the way we organize business frameworks and business models were all defined by hand. We chose what to include and how it fits together.
Source and subject selection is human. Which people and companies get playbooks, which books and materials we use, and how we prioritize new content are editorial decisions. We sometimes use AI-assisted tools to discover or organize sources, but the decision to include or exclude a subject or a source is ours.
Everything is edited and approved before it goes live. Content is not published as raw AI output. Drafts produced with AI assistance are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited. The playbooks, mental models, and other editorial content you see live in a curated content base that we maintain and control.
The product itself was built by us. The site, information architecture, and chat experience were designed and implemented by our team. The AI chat answers from our curated content, not from the open web.
AI-assisted: research and drafting
Fact extraction from sources. We process licensed books and other materials through a structured pipeline: text is chunked, then run through a fact-extraction step that pulls out facts, timelines, and ideas (not verbatim expression). That structured data is aggregated and used as input for the next stage.
Synthesis and drafting. A second stage turns that structured data into narrative and playbook-style prose in our voice and format. Prompts and parameters are set for consistency. The output is then edited and approved by us before publication.
Chat and retrieval. When you ask the AI a question, it retrieves from our curated playbooks, mental models, and decision tools and answers using that material. It cites back to our editorial content. So the chat is AI-assisted retrieval and generation over a corpus we built and maintain, not a generic search of the internet.
In short: we use a two-stage pipeline for playbook content — AI extracts facts from licensed sources and drafts in our format; every piece is reviewed and edited by humans before it goes live. Structure, taxonomy, and final say are human. AI is the tool.
About Faster Than Normal has more on our methodology and what we believe.