If You Don't Do This in Claude, it Could Ruin Your Reputation (10-80-10 Rule: Pt 2)

Brandon Gaille (0:04)

My name is Brandon Gailey, and this is the AI Genius Podcast, where I teach you the top Claude growth hacks from Claude Power users in short No Fluff episodes.

Let's go ahead and get started. In the summer of 1899, two lawyers came to see Asa Candler, the man who owned Coca-Cola. Back then, Coca-Cola was mostly sold by a glass at soda fountains, and a man named Benjamin Thomas wanted the right to put it into bottles. Candler didn't think much of the idea because bottling was new and he was worried a bad bottle could hurt his brand. He signed it anyway, giving Benjamin Thomas the right to bottle Coca-Cola across most of the country for just $1, a dollar he reportedly never bothered to collect. Two details in the contract of that deal mattered far more than that $1. It allowed the bottlers to buy their syrup from Coke at a fixed price per gallon, and nothing in the contract said when the deal would ever end. For about 20 years, those two details didn't seem to matter. Then, after the First World War, the price of sugar shot past 23 cents a pound. The company was selling syrup to the bottlers at the same fixed price from $18.99, costing them serious amounts of money. At that point, Asa Candler had already sold the company, and the new owners tried to cancel the contracts. The bottlers sued, and in 1920, a federal court ruled that the contracts were perpetual, which meant they would never end. Coca-Cola spent the next 60 years buying back those bottling rights at great expense, because Asa Candler did not take the time to review every word of the contract. Every draft Claude hands you is a contract like that one, and the moment you hit send or press publish, your reputation is bound to every word that Claude wrote. Before anything made by Claude goes out with your name on it, you have to review it line by line. That is the last part of the 108010 rule that AI power users live by. If you're new to my podcast, the 108010 rule splits every task that you give Claude into three parts. The first 10% is your brief where you explain what you want. The middle 80% is Claude doing the drafting and the building. And the final 10% is the line by line review. The previous episode covered the first 10%, and this episode will cover the last 10%.

The final 10% of this rule is really two separate jobs. Job one is reading and fixing the draft in front of you, and job two is fixing whatever produced the mistake, so it never comes back again in future outputs. Job one protects today's work, and job two protects every draft that comes after it. The sad fact is that most people skipped the last 10%, and the research confirms this. A study by KPMG surveyed more than 48,000 people across 47 countries. This study found that two out of three workers who use AI on the job said that they rely on its output without checking it for accuracy. That means that 66% of the time, whatever AI gives someone, they just send it out whether it's an email, a blog post, or anything like that. I would also imagine that the 33% that say they check, are probably skimming it instead of really going through it line by line. Skimming fails with Claude because its mistakes don't really look like mistakes most of the time. A draft from a tired coworker warns you with typos and tangled sentences, but Claude's drafts arrive clean so that your eyes start to relax and you kind of glide on through the review process. What you always have to remember is that whatever the draft says, you said, because the person reading it has no idea Claude wrote it for you. The words on the page become your words the moment that you hit send or publish. Reading every word of a draft does not mean reading once from top to bottom the way you'd read a novel. The pros do this with four quick passes, each one of them hunting a single kind of problem, because your eye catches far more when it knows what it's looking for. The first thing that you'll do is read the entire draft out loud at the speed that you would actually say it, or at the speed someone would actually read it. Reading with your eyes can lead to skipping words or areas that you might not catch when you read it out loud. Also, when you read it out loud, the clunky sentence and the phrase used three times too many tend to give themselves away.