How we built this
The library and its content were built with human editorial control and AI used as a tool for research and drafting. Here is how the two work together.
Human-led: editorial 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 organization of frameworks and business models were all defined by hand. We chose what to include and how it connects.
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 search experience were designed and built by our team. The search draws from our curated content, not 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.
Search and retrieval. When you ask a question, the system retrieves from our curated playbooks, mental models, and decision tools and answers using that material, citing back to the editorial source. This is AI-assisted retrieval over a corpus we built and maintain — not a search of the open internet.
The short version: a two-stage pipeline. AI extracts facts from licensed sources and drafts in our format. Every piece is reviewed and edited by humans before publication. Structure, taxonomy, and final say are ours. AI is the tool.
About Faster Than Normal covers the full editorial methodology.