speaking-model

Speaking Model

A practitioner’s dictionary for the working language between humans and AI models

There are no magic words for talking to AI — but there is a working language, the same way surgery and aviation have one: compression with precision. This book catalogs it. The verbs that act as contracts (refactor ≠ rewrite ≠ fix), the constraint grammar that actually gets obeyed, the epistemic controls that trade fluent confidence for truth, and the anti-patterns that feel powerful and aren’t.

One rule underneath all of it:

A model completes the document you started. Every word you write is evidence about what document this is and how it should continue.

Everything in this book is technique for supplying precise evidence.

Who this is for

• New users — every entry in Parts I–VI (the request techniques — Verbs, Modifiers, Constraint Grammar, Epistemic Controls, Context Syntax, the Iteration Loop) carries a plain-language example (🔰)
• Engineers & architects — the same entries each carry an advanced example (🏗️) too
• Anyone tired of cargo-cult prompt tips — the preface explains why “power words” are astrology, and what works instead

The map

Part	What it covers
I — The Verbs	Operative verbs as contracts, with dual-level examples
II — The Modifiers	Adverbs of thought: plan-first, first-principles, zoom
III — Constraint Grammar	must/never/only, scope fences, format contracts, budgets
IV — Epistemic Controls	The truthfulness toolkit — highest value per word
V — Context Syntax	Delimiters, few-shot examples, prefills, audience clauses
VI — The Iteration Loop	Diff-based feedback, ratchets, checkpoints
VII — The Jargon	The nouns of the trade, agent-era included
VIII — Anti-Patterns	What feels powerful and isn’t
IX — The Grammar	The complete request, slot by slot — a diagnostic tool
X — Session Design	Prompts are sentences; sessions are paragraphs
XI — Speaking Aloud	The language over voice
XII — Meta-Prompting	Using the model on the conversation itself
Appendix	Further study: docs, papers (verified links), practitioners

Start here: read the Preface and Part IX (the Grammar). Those two alone change how you write your next request. The rest is vocabulary you acquire as you need it.

The fluency test

You speak this language when three habits are unconscious:

1. You state the check with every task — how we’ll both know it’s right.
2. You correct with reasons and diffs — “keep A, change B, because C.”
3. You ask for disagreement and don’t flinch when you get it.

Read & use

• The book
• Cheat sheet
• Prompt linter

Source & downloads

• Obsidian vault — download the zip, open in Obsidian
• for-agents — the Grammar as drop-in Claude Code config: two CLAUDE.md lines and a /rewrite command

Contributing

New entries welcome. A good entry has: the term, a one-sentence definition of the contract it makes, and both a 🔰 and 🏗️ example. This repo requires pull requests from outside contributors — create a branch, open a PR, and it merges through review. Keep the tone of the book: precise, honest, no astrology.

Honesty note

This field’s half-life is short. The principles here are durable; verify anything time-sensitive against the primary sources in the Appendix. Part IV of the book applies to the book itself.

License

CC BY 4.0 — share and adapt freely, with attribution.

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Drafted in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic), July 2026. The collaboration is itself a demonstration of Part VI.

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