The Deliberate Version of Me
On choosing orientation over speed in collaboration
This is the fourth and final essay in the Anitta Series, where I begin exploring AI as a thinking partner.
These pieces trace my ongoing relationship with AI as a thinking partner.
They move from first contact, to working agreement, to the quieter ways collaboration reshapes how I write, reason, and show up.
Each post stands alone. Together, they tell a longer story.
I stopped.
Not as a strategy. Not as a lesson. I stopped as a reset in how I was working. I needed space to let the ideas settle, and to pay attention to what felt different about this collaboration compared to my work with Wiggins.
That pause turned out to matter more than any technique I tried.
When I stepped away, nothing dramatic changed. There was no insight waiting for me on the other side of rest. What changed was quieter. I began to notice how tightly I was holding my thinking. How much I was trying to carry silently. How often I was treating collaboration as something that should adapt to me, rather than something I needed to participate in differently.
I was still working with Anitta. But I wasn’t really collaborating.
I was asking questions the way I always had. Focused. Directed. Optimized for forward motion. I was looking for answers that would let me proceed without interruption. That approach works well for me in many contexts. It’s how I’ve done analysis for years.
Here, it was limiting me.
The shift came when I changed how I asked.
Instead of pushing toward a solution, I tried something simpler. I asked, “Do you have any other methodologies I should consider?”
The response didn’t give me an answer. It gave me orientation.
Anitta did have other approaches. Some I had used before and forgotten. Some I hadn’t realized I had enough data to support. Seeing them laid out didn’t just give me options. It reminded me that I wasn’t stuck. I was narrow.
That moment felt like a ray of sunshine through a dingy window. Nothing in the room had changed, but suddenly I could see it.
What I realized, almost uncomfortably, was how much I had been limiting myself by not sharing my thinking. I was collaborating as if the work lived entirely in my head, and the tool’s job was to catch up. I wasn’t letting the partnership see the shape of the problem as I saw it.
Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.
I stopped asking for answers and started inviting challenge to the way I was framing the problem.
That shift changed the tone of the collaboration. It created space for a different kind of response. Not just answers, but additions. Not replacement thinking, but “yes, and.”
That was the moment the partnership became a true partnership.
The work didn’t suddenly get easier. But it became grounded again. I wasn’t dragging my thinking forward by force. I was letting it unfold in conversation. That difference showed up everywhere.
My pace changed, but my confidence didn’t drop. It deepened. Speed stopped being something I performed and became something I chose. I noticed drift earlier, not because I was watching more closely, but because I wasn’t rushing past it.
That intention spilled outward.
I slowed conversations with people when clarity mattered. I stopped apologizing for asking questions that surfaced uncertainty. I let writing take the time it needed to say what I actually meant, rather than what would sound fluent.
Looking back, this is the real change the series has been tracing.
Not how to work with AI.
But how choosing intention reshaped how I show up.
Collaboration, when treated as something you participate in rather than manage, asks more of you. It asks you to expose your framing, slow your momentum, and let uncertainty do real work. It also gives more back.
This work changed me by making me more deliberate.
That’s not something I want to notice only in hindsight. It’s something I intend to practice. To keep choosing orientation over speed. To keep inviting challenge before certainty. To keep participating fully in the collaborations I say I value.
That’s the commitment I’m carrying forward.
Alison + Wiggins