Heligoland, three therapists and a petrol station attendant
Nicola Mattina
Episode #008
What are we talking about
In this second part the conversation takes unexpected paths.
Nicola tells me about his tools for designing delegation to AI: the Prompt Canvas and the AI Collaboration Canvas. The problem, we discover, is not technology.
It's that people know how to do their job, but they don't know how to describe it.
We slide into ontologies, into RAG, into context engineering – esoteric words to say a simple thing: someone will have to build the memories of organizations. A profession that doesn't exist today.
Then Nicola confesses to me a personal practice: when he has a problem, he asks ChatGPT to play three therapists with different orientations and makes them argue with each other. It's not therapy. It's a way to illuminate the same problem from angles that you wouldn't see on your own.
Rovelli's Helgoland comes to mind: matter exists only in relation to other matter. Maybe even problems.
And finally training.
Enough with the "petrol station" model - you come in, get your fill of knowledge, clear the course without learning anything. Nicola is building something different: a conversational agent that forces you to really understand.
What work will we be doing in five years? Nobody knows. But at least we're asking ourselves the right questions.
Nicola Mattina
Product Manager & AI Explorer
Nicola Mattina is a product manager with over twenty years of experience in building digital products. Founded and sold a startup to Apple, led development teams for Translated and Pagine Mediche.
Since the arrival of ChatGPT he has transformed generative AI into his daily work and thought tool — using it for documentation, brainstorming, simulations and meta-prompting.
His vision: AI does not replace skills, but amplifies the ability of those who know how to describe their work. Those who cannot explain what they do cannot delegate. Neither to a human, nor to a machine.
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