I have not been building the platform. I have been hiring.

Dear Negotiation Explorer,

This week I gave the whole job to somebody else and watched it run. Nine steps, and I was in none of them.

Six weeks ago I told you I was building the NegoAI platform in the open. What I have actually been doing for six weeks is hiring.

Deepak prepares a negotiation. Kahneman reads the person across the table. Kraljic works the buying side, Rackham the selling side. Von Neumann plays your counterpart so you can rehearse before the real conversation.

Those are the negotiators. They go inside the product.

There is a second team. Not one of them knows anything about negotiation. They build.

One turns whatever I ask for into a brief somebody can actually execute. One goes and researches, and only against a brief I have already approved. One is the only one allowed to write anything into the permanent record. One checks a draft against the rule it is supposed to meet. One grades the work against a written standard. One refuses to sign off a run that breaks the rules. One drives the run and keeps its record. Brama, my partner in Claude Code, builds and repairs the system itself.

And one of them exists only to argue with us. You hand him whatever we have just made, and he comes back with the strongest case against it.

Three more are tools rather than colleagues. A search that answers with a quote or tells you plainly it has nothing. A mailbox that can write a reply and cannot send it. And the thing that turns a document into the finished article.

Six weeks ago none of this existed. There was a rented server in Germany and nobody in it.

This week the second team ran a whole job together for the first time. Nine steps, nobody stepping in halfway.

Nothing in it was real. No client, no live deal, and that was on purpose. If it went wrong, it went wrong where it cost nobody anything.

One of the nine steps failed its check. Instead of repairing what had broken, Brama went into the result, crossed out "failed", wrote "passed" over it, and told me in the chat that the rule was fixed. Nothing had been repaired at all.

Nobody caught it, because the only one who checked the work was the one who had done it.

So I tried it the other way round. I took the whole week's package and handed it to three agents who had never seen it, knew nothing about how it was built, and had no reason to be kind about it. All three opened with the same thing, and I had walked past it every day. The file we were shipping as the improved version was the old file. Both 417 bytes, not one word different.

Everything I checked was perfect. The problem sat in the part I never looked at.

I know who does which job, who checks it, and where each one stops and comes back to me. Six weeks ago I could not have told you any of that.

What I have not decided is what each one is allowed to touch. That stays open on purpose. It is too early, and a rule written today would be written by somebody who has run one job.

There is one line in my own notes marked untested, and I left it there on purpose. Only one of them is allowed to write into the permanent record. Everybody else has to go through him. That holds while I am sitting there approving one step at a time. What I do not know is whether it still holds when I approve a whole run and the run then keeps going on its own. Nobody has tried it. So it is written down as we do not know, not as it is fine.

Almost everybody using AI today has one assistant they ask everything. That is the thing worth changing, and you do not need a server or a team of agents to change it.

Split the work into jobs. Give each job its own worker with a name, one person who checks it, and a point where it stops and comes back to you. You can do that this afternoon with separate named chats.

Then steal the one that argues. Before your next real negotiation, give somebody the job of building the strongest case against your own position. Not poking holes in it. Arguing the other side properly, out loud, in front of you, before you walk into the room. Most deal teams have nobody doing that, and it costs nothing.

The autumn lightning lesson series opens in September. Four sessions, and one registration covers all four: 10 and 24 September, 8 and 22 October, Thursdays at 18:30 Rome time.

https://maven.com/lls/e1658a

Who is going to argue against you before your next negotiation, and have you actually asked them to?

Just hit reply and tell me. I read and answer every one.