John Gottman, a famous marriage researcher, watched couples argue for fifteen minutes in the seventies and found happy marriages run about five positive interactions for every negative one. He used that ratio to predict divorce nine years later with 94% accuracy. It's the science behind the shit sandwich, except the sandwich has five pieces of bread, if we're being literal.
The parenting books say the same thing. Catch them being good. Praise the behaviours you want more of. Don't dwell on what they're doing wrong. Never call your child a name they might one day live up to.
And we all know that complaining is career-limiting. We're trained to articulate problems into wonderful "opportunities" we'd LOVE to support [insert person responsible] solving.
Basically, the whole adult playbook trains you to overemphasise what you like and deliver feedback so positively that it's hard to identify the actual problem. Because that's how you get the best out of humans - engaged teams, supportive managers, functioning marriages, probably more friends.
Then Claude shows up.
Showing Claude what "good" looks like absolutely trains the system toward your desired output. But brutally honest complaints are what really finesse it.
So the workflow becomes strangely simple: provide a direction, check the output, constantly tell it what it's doing wrong until you like it.
My husband, I have learned, does not respond well to this management style.
Claude, however, reacts beautifully to five things I don't like and zero actual suggestions for dinner.
The good news is we're already fluent in listing what we don't like - just in our heads. Unless that's just me, in which case this newsletter has suddenly become quite exposing.
So now I unleash my inner Karen on Claude. The list is long, growing, and arguably slightly unhinged. Here are a few of them:
Stop rabbiting on. Bullet points only.
Don't touch anything of mine without telling me what you're about to do and getting my approval.
Stop praising my prompt before you answer it and treating me like a genius.
Drop "delve," "navigate," "landscape," and "the messy middle" from your vocabulary entirely.
If my instructions are unclear and more information would vastly change the output use AskUserQuestion to clarify. Don’t guess.
Don't be charming about it when you've failed. Just say what you got wrong. And APOLOGISE.
That felt good. Maybe I have issues.
But shaping a system is a different - and very new - skillset to working with humans. Good operators will need to master both. Hopefully, you're already nailing the human part, and your inner Karen is sitting there, twitching to be unleashed.
Don't worry, my kids still get praise. My team still gets the sandwich. My husband still gets the carefully articulated feedback, mostly.
Claude gets my list of unedited grievances.
Just don't get this mixed up.
Your manager does not want to hear the ten things you hate about them.
Unless one day they become an AI agent. Now there's a thought to land on 😂
This week's challenge
Start a grievance file.
Open a doc called:
10 Things I Hate About Claude
Add to it every time it does something annoying this week.
Then paste the list into your Claude Cowork instructions and feel smug.
After that, go give your partner, kids, or colleagues a handful of compliments to rebalance the universe.
See you next week,
Sarah xx