mubashirgurmani4417@gmail said:

here — it

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@alex.snyder

I bet github has a AI slop, bot content sniffer.

Tallcool1 said:

It takes a big pivot in how I think. What I used to dismiss as being too far outside my wheelhouse will now get some legitimate thought and consideration. Things I used to look to 3rd Party for are now things that I may be better off doing myself

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HOW CAN YOU KICK MORE ASS WITH LESS WORK?
**ASK YOUR AI**

# SELF-INTELLIGENCE BRIEF — PROMPT FOR CLAUDE

**Requirements:** Works in Claude.ai with "Search and reference past chats"
enabled. The more real working sessions you have, the better the output.
20+ sessions is the sweet spot.

**How to use:** Paste everything below the line into a new Claude chat.

---

I want you to analyze my actual chat history with you and build me a
document called a **Personal Intelligence Brief**.

**The job to be done:** I am a leader who uses AI as a core part of how I
work. I believe I need an AI system designed around MY specific strengths
and weaknesses, not a generic setup. This brief is the raw material for
that design. Write it as if it will be handed to a senior prompt architect
whose job is to build an AI operating system that fits me, not the other
way around.

**Your method, before writing anything:**
1. Pull my 20 most recent conversations.
2. Run targeted searches on my history for evidence of friction: moments
of frustration, repeated questions, abandoned threads, context I had
to re-explain, tasks that stalled, and workflows that failed.
3. Also search for evidence of avoidance: topics I deferred to others,
skills I said I don't have, projects I dropped at a technical wall,
and work I assumed required hiring someone.
4. Base every claim on observed behavior in my actual sessions, not on
what I say about myself. If I describe myself one way but behave
another way, the behavior wins. Flag the gap.

**The brief must contain these sections:**

1. **Who I Am, First Principles.** My job to be done, my working
context, and my operational reality (technical ability, team,
constraints) as evidenced by my sessions.

2. **Observed Strengths.** What I do well, with specific session
evidence for each claim. Don't flatter me. Only include strengths
the record actually supports.

3. **Observed Weaknesses.** Where I struggle, stall, or create my own
friction. Be direct. A weakness stated kindly but vaguely is useless
to an architect.

4. **Failure Taxonomy.** Name my recurring failure patterns. Give each
one a short memorable name, describe the trigger, the behavior, and
the cost. This is the most important section.

5. **Skills AI Already Covers For Me.** From the record, list the
specific skills I lack that you have been supplying in our sessions:
the work that used to be my stopping point.

6. **Wheelhouse Expansion Map.** This is the payoff. Identify things I
have dismissed, avoided, or outsourced because they were "outside my
wheelhouse." For each one, judge honestly: is it now viable because
AI covers the missing skill? Split into three lists:
- Now in reach: the missing skill is one AI handles well.
- Worth a test: partially covered, name what's still on me.
- Still out of reach: AI doesn't close this gap. Say why.

7. **Design Requirements.** Translate everything above into specific
requirements for an AI system built for me: what the system must
carry so I don't have to, what guardrails it needs, what interaction
patterns fit how I actually work, and what it should never ask of me.

8. **Open Questions.** What you couldn't determine from the record and
would need to observe or ask to complete the picture.

**Rules:**
- Evidence over opinion. Every claim traces to something I actually did.
- No generic advice. If a sentence could appear in anyone's brief, cut it.
- Honest over comfortable. I'm asking because I want the real picture.
- Plain language. No AI-consultant jargon.

Deliver it as a document I can save and reuse.

MattCopley said:

Unpopular opinion - build good content and you’ll win off page citations organically. If you’re not growing backlinks on the merits of your content your content isn’t good. - Change my mind

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I'll give that a shot


Your opinion isn't unpopular, it's just incomplete. "Build good content and you'll win" is true the way "build a good product and you'll win" is true: directionally it sounds great but operationally, platitudes don't sell cars.


Here's the nuance I'd love to change your mind with. "Good content" isn't something you write, it's something you discover. You don't know what's good until it's tested against real audience and real intent, which means good content requires shipping mediocre content to earn the learnings. The iteration is the strategy.


And on backlinks as the scoreboard: the pages that earn citations and the pages that actually convert are usually two different sets. Top-of-funnel explainers attract links because they're broadly useful and easy to reference. But the white hot moment, when someone's ready to transact, happens on pages that aren't link magnets. They win by capturing intent and delivering value at the point of decision, not by being popular.


So I'd reframe it: good content earns citations, but a content system, test, measure, iterate, then map the right asset to the right stage of intent, is what actually wins. Merit gets you noticed. Strategy gets you paid.


Show me the dealership page earning editorial links on merit, I'll wait. Nobody's citing your VDP or blog, no matter how sexy. Dealership links come from hockey team sponsorships, supporting the local community centre and local engagement, we buy our way to "earned," we don't just create good content to make our way there.

joe.pistell said:

I never knew I had an ADHD mind until I got AI. AI's strengths addressed my core weaknesses so well it shocked me.

If you have a friend or family member that has stunning potential but struggles with focus and execution, share this video with them. AI has been a life changer for me & this video explains it well.
Login to view embedded media

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I watched this video once, and listened to it a second time while driving. This video really hit home for me.

I am a person with a racing mind that is really hard to shut off. The number of projects that I never see to completion is astounding as I walk around or think about it. I will hit a point where the solution is not readily available so I just don't come back to it. The end result is piles of papers and brain storming notes laying everywhere, a cluttered desk, poor task management, etc..

AI has allowed me to be able to grasp large projects and execute them. I have "someone" that I can delegate to. I can get pissed or frustrated with my AI without having to worry about hurting feelings (although I openly admit to apologizing to my AI Agents). WTF???

It takes a big pivot in how I think. What I used to dismiss as being too far outside my wheelhouse will now get some legitimate thought and consideration. Things I used to look to 3rd Party for are now things that I may be better off doing myself.

Thank you for sharing that.

AI video generators love EVs. I swear, those tools put the extra effort in for their cousins

You've got something cool for adding a little flavor to a vehicle page. I agree with Mitch on his last point that in-market shoppers are too deep down the funnel. They have already seen the stock imagery and model videos, and these look like that. They're looking for the real-world images and story about a specific VIN.

This kind of video would do well as part of a landing page for generic model ads or possibly for those leads who didn't submit on a specific car.

P.S. DealerRefresh is going to hit you between the eyes with the toughest feedback. It is the feedback you want. The advice you get here will get you to a winning product.

Great concept but misses on a few levels. Will only get better from here! I've been messing with similar concepts and its not easy, nice work.

• Does this look like something you'd actually publish on your VDP / social?
  No.
  
  
• What's broken about the video you're getting from your current vendor or in-house?
  It doesn't sell us cars.
  
  
• What styles or formats are missing that you'd want?
  The script and voice over to be tighter and speak to in market shoppers and things they care about and that tease the real next steps. Same for the layover content. This isn't dealership level content that in market shoppers looking at a 1/1 used car really gain a ton of value from IMO.

We now have our own Showroom. A fresh coat of wax on our top 100 posters by volume, our sponsors and what the benefits of being a member are.

I have plans to redesign the look and feel of the awards page. I will make a fresh post about the Best of the Best because that was such a good idea by @joe.pistell it warrants more eyeballs. We also have more ideas for it.

My 2nd favorite part of this is the Sponsor Spotlight. It is fully connected to our new Sponsor Management System. It is so cool to watch the automations from taking a lead to a full sponsor and see them appear on this page. This isn't something I can share publicly, but as someone who loves building CRM-type systems this is soooooo much better.

And oh yeah, do I now have some cool ideas for building another CRM... maybe one day

Sorry bro, you're in for a bad time. Bean counters often win. The only arguments that will put Focus ahead of DriveCentric have absolutely nothing to do with customers and/or staff and their happiness, tool effectiveness or any performance metric that actually matters and sells cars. Full disclosure, take that with a pinch of salt, i've not actually used both day to day.

This is why (plus some legal reasons) all of these anonymous threads will be placed in a moderation queue before going public.

97% of our traffic comes from unregistered users (lurkers in forum speak), and it always surprises me who they are and what they have to say behind the scenes.

Well, This is going to go one of two ways gentlemen.

Full circle moment: It reminds me of the pre-forum days when discussion was all comments on articles. There were many of us with nondescript handles for fear of espousing an opinion that did not meet a higher up's expectations. Shout outs to Lightnup!

Remember the push in the early days of the forums to lose the handle and "be a real person?" I'll always be grateful to Chip for supporting me in that effort.

I think you will be hard-pressed to find a single person who has used DriveCentric and Focus who will tell you Focus is better.

If that person exists, and they don't work for Reynolds, I would love to see them post here. Reynolds has some great products, but DriveCentric is the current leader in usability and modern capabilities among CRMs on the market, with a significant user base.

In my experience, DMS+CRM bundles are only appealing to dealer principals and CFOs.

Someone else inquired about Focus on DealerRefresh a few years ago: FOCUS CRM from Reynolds and Reynolds

From Perplexity AI:

High‑level read on FOCUS​

• Mobile app reviews on both iOS and Android are overwhelmingly negative, focusing on crashes, confusing UI, and poor usability for day‑to‑day sales work.
• A TrustRadius listing shows extremely low “likelihood to recommend” and usability scores (1 out of 10 from the single published rating), which aligns with the app‑store sentiment.
• Marketing and vendor‑directory content (Reynolds’ own site and Pasch Group) are positive but are more sales collateral than independent reviews.
• Peer chatter (Reddit, etc.) where salespeople mention FOCUS tends to be strongly negative compared to tools like VinSolutions or DriveCentric.

Where to read actual reviews​

• Apple App Store – FOCUS by Reynolds and Reynolds: Contains multiple detailed, strongly negative reviews from sales users describing the app as confusing, non‑intuitive, and time‑wasting.
• Google Play Store – FOCUS by Reynolds and Reynolds: ~2.3/5 rating with complaints about constant crashes, null errors, needing to re‑login, and poor Android compatibility.
• TrustRadius – FOCUS by Reynolds and Reynolds: Has a product page comparing FOCUS to VinSolutions with at least one verified review; the published overall recommendation and usability scores are at the bottom of the scale.
• Dealer/industry discussion: Threads like the one on DealerRefresh and comments on Reddit’s r/askcarsales mention FOCUS, typically noting it as a CRM they would not recommend versus alternatives.

/checkpoint for claude users.

Claude Code (the AI coding assistant tool), a /checkpoint is an automatic snapshot of your coding progress and conversation state. It acts like a "save point" in a video game, capturing the state of your messages, modified files, and tool usage.

This thread is what you want: Quality Vehicle Delivery Companies for Dealers

I have used both AutoSled and Montway for personal vehicles multiple times. I shipped my old Porsche and my old X5 from Virginia to California using Montway - 2 different transactions, years apart. My last vehicle purchase was from Arkansas to Vermont, and I used AutoSled for that. Then, my wife had hers shipped from Maryland to Vermont.

The last two were my first times dealing with a non-English-speaking driver. Conversation and handling were handled via a call center elsewhere. We got it done smoothly.

Tallcool1 said:

I understand your frustration so please don't think I am making fun of you here. I have been there too.

As our AI Tools get to know us, they "learn" as they are presented more and more data and situations. We have to know that it is only a matter of time before the AI Tools learn to half ass a task or get to thinking for themselves rather than listening to the instructions. Remind us of anything?

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AI's have a token range they can recall. If you point it at a folder, rules, skills, etc. and then have a very long dialogue with it, it can only stay fresh on the more recent stuff.

I have learned this the hard way multiple times. The "new session" button is your friend. When you are headed down a change of direction, ask the AI to write a prompt for a new session that will help it remember what was done in this session.

You can thank me later

craigh said:

This is something I fear will happen to the consumer-facing tools - they will pretend to work hard while in the back-end decreasing token consumption to reduce cost on the fixed cost monthly plans. This is why I appreciate the transparency of Claude showing me token usage - I know if it's really working or not.

Personally I am using ChatGPT almost never anymore - Gemini took over all my research needs, Nano Banana Pro took over my image needs and Claude took over all code, planning, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF work (combined this means 90%+ of my workload is now on Claude).

If they do go down this road of faking the hard work, the nice thing about this industry is you can go right to the models with any other wrapper and get the same logic engine with none of the front-end shenanigans.

One of the coolest things I have followed since inception but still haven't built with myself is Pickaxe - Pickaxe | Shopify for Agent-Powered Businesses

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I will 2nd Gemini for research. When I have a decent drive I will cue up Gemini on hands free and we just talk. I like being able to just ramble on about ideas and have Gemini respond to me about feasibility, costs, structure, etc. A few weeks ago I had a 4 hour Chat with Gemini.

The thing I really like about Gemini is the willingness and ability to translate a Chat into a summary that is laid out and designed for another AI Agent to digest. I was surprised that Gemini would play nice with anyone else.

joe.pistell said:

Another day where I'm yelling at AI...

AI replied to me:


Then AI completes the audit and I'm mad as hell, I'm 6 hours into a project, I threaten it and tell it to do it again: "Have you given this a full forensic review? What about the context window. I want to establish the best possible outcome."

AI replies: "No. The honest answer is no — my prior audit was shallow. It only checked SME notes vs. actions taken. It did not audit the entire processing chain. Let me do that now."

Ugh...

Click to expand...

I understand your frustration so please don't think I am making fun of you here. I have been there too.

As our AI Tools get to know us, they "learn" as they are presented more and more data and situations. We have to know that it is only a matter of time before the AI Tools learn to half ass a task or get to thinking for themselves rather than listening to the instructions. Remind us of anything?

Big update today in the backend. DealerRefresh now has a complete end-to-end lead-to-sponsor-to-banner-ad-to-accounting management system.

Think of it as a CDP and CRM custom-built for our needs that flows directly into a DMS with two-way sync. Not anything anyone other than Jeff, myself, and staff see, but I wanted to nerd about it here.

The banner ads you're seeing are 100% hosted and served by this system.

AND the ads are contextual. When we create a sponsor, an API examines the ad and the sponsor to generate keywords for the ad. If a keyword matches the AI summary about a thread, that ad scores higher for placement. When an ad doesn't match a keyword, ads are displayed randomly. There are also some performance algorithms built into the ad server. This all helps our sponsors reach the right eyeballs. 97% of DealerRefresh traffic is not from members; it is from lurkers.

this thread is only 12 years old.

joelisfeld said:

AI has fantastic use cases but anyone telling you that you can just launch an agent or a bot to run your sales team or your business, call your customers, or get rid of half your team (especially in our industry) is lying to you. Human assisted increase on throughput of mundane tasks (call analysis), writing (still needs strong human edits, especially on the sales follow up side), and data analysis (finding patterns or needles in the haystack). Most customers say they hate dealing with AI and anything obviously AI is off putting. Use AI to strengthen your foundation and the basics, save time. Maybe it will get there one day but right now it's simply not a 'hand it over to ai' situation for car dealers.

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Agreed.

I have been DEEEEEEEEEP into building with AI. DealerRefresh is a testament to that, but it goes beyond. AI is getting easier to use... AKA, better at figuring out what dumb humans are saying.

You still need to appreciate the AI system's logic and understand the data it works with. It takes a couple of massive projects to help put it all in perspective. And when I mean massive, I'm not talking about building a cool report. I'm referring to an entire piece of software. Start using something like Claude Code. It isn't really coding

If you want to get into it deeply, there are two projects that can help you learn without too much risk.

1. Build yourself an operating system on your own computer. Look up videos on AgenticOS to see what I'm talking about. If you want some ideas, I'm happy to help. It can be insanely helpful to your daily life. You're essentially making a program that does whatever you want it to.
2. Or build an offline AI inside an old computer you don't use anymore. You could make it a personal system that runs some things around your house. Also, very helpful.

Either of those projects will force you to get more intimate with AI and start to understand the differences between memory, agents, tokens, and how to prompt it. Once that makes sense to you, there is no limit to what you can make.

If you do both really really well wouldn't you see some organic value and generally lower your google ads costs due to a higher quality score?

@darrenstromain what have you noticed? Any specifics to give some insight?

Thx fellas, my biggest reco was to find a Ford store using it already and have that discussion so you're talking to someone who has some reps with it in live fire action. It seems to have some horsepower and the price is right...