What Board Games Taught Me About Working with AI

Katie Parrott draws an unexpected parallel between Settlers of Catan strategy and effective AI collaboration. The skills she transferred to working with a writing agent — resource management, probabilistic thinking, knowing when to trade and when to hold, reading the board state — turn out to map surprisingly well onto directing AI agents.

The piece argues that the meta-skill of AI collaboration is not prompting or technical knowledge but the ability to manage uncertainty, make sequential decisions with incomplete information, and adapt strategy as the game state changes — all things board games train you to do.

RDCO mapping: Good frame for thinking about the founder-AI collaboration model we run. The “read the board state” metaphor applies to how we decide which tasks to delegate to the autonomous loop versus handle manually. Potential Sanity Check angle on unexpected skill transfers to AI work.