Hey beautiful human,
“You are awesome. We need more Debs.”
That landed in my inbox from Allie K. Miller at 11:09 Tuesday night.
I had spent her AI workshop for Gen X women blowing up the comments, rallying folks, and treating the webinar comment feed like the old-school chat room it so clearly wanted to be.
She noticed.
If you don’t know Allie, she’s basically the goddess when it comes to women in AI. She thanked me for adding so much to the room and offered to honor the earlier price for her mastermind.
I wrote back and told her the mastermind was in direct conflict with my budget.
Cats need kibble. Hubs has been picking up the slack on my unemployed-building-a-business-a**. We’re living on one-third of what we brought in when I worked at Accenture. My 401(k) went from $140,000 to $13,000 in 18 months. We filed for bankruptcy in July.
I also told her Gen X women get sht done and fck the patriarchy. I said I’d be haunting her free stuff for a bit, yet. Then I told her to f*ck the haters and keep kickin’ azzzzzzz.
Sent from my iPhone.
Five hours later, she wrote back.
“Yes, you guys are an absolute get-shit-done generation, and you are more than welcome to haunt as much as you would like :)”
So I will.
The whole week has felt like a merry-go-round set one click faster than usual.
You spin me right round, baby. Apparently that’s the business plan now.
I ran a 30-minute Tooling Tuesday for AI-Powered Women, tried to cram in entirely too much, and somehow built a little app live. You give it a few details and it writes an increasingly weird out-of-office message.
Wednesday I left the house. On purpose.
I went to Twin Cities Startup Week as the sidekick, I guess, for someone giving a talk on crowdfunding for startups. I rewarded this public appearance with Black Walnut Bakery, the closest you’ll get to a European patisserie in Minneapolis.
There were so many yummies.
The business I’m building with three other women has a name now: You. Actually. It’s about helping women separate who they are from who they’ve had to become because of their work, figure out what happened along the way, and set their own terms for what comes next.
There’s M3D with a very good buddy of mine. She knows who she is. Giggity giggity.
Emily and I have plans. I bought another domain today.
R Generation may be winding down, or maybe turning into something else. I haven’t written that newsletter in a month. Part of me has missed it. Another part has enjoyed getting that time back.
It is currently a battle to keep everything straight in my head.
But I’m getting to do more of the part I love. Creating images. Looking at colors. Building brands. Writing the words, which the biz insists on calling “copy.”
Yesterday I crashed and slept almost twelve hours.
Today I was back in the colors.
The merry-go-round is going faster and faster, and I’m kind of enjoying it.
I’m still holding tight to the unicorn.
At some point I will probably fling both hands into the air and start screaming and yelling and having a great time.
Weekly Least-Offensive Ad
Yup. This is how people with a newsletter actually pay for it. By putting ads in their stuffs. This is a newsletter I recently started receiving and it’s pretty okay on the scale of okay-ness.
The tool your team adopts next quarter is in today's issue. TLDR AI is curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers and read by 1.1M+ people who like being first. Free, daily.
Radical Remembering
Here's what I keep forgetting: the title came after the verbs.
She was leading before anybody called her a leader.
She was making the call. Calming the room. Seeing the mess three corners before everybody else walked into it.
Then somebody changed the line under her name.
Director.
Vice President.
Head of Whatever.
The noun showed up late and took credit for all the verbs.
Then the job ends. The noun disappears. And suddenly she starts putting everything else in the past tense.
I used to lead.
I used to know.
I used to be good at this.
Used to?
The company can keep the noun.
Those verbs were always yours.
Last Week’s Shenanigans
Three this week. If you're new here, this is where I share the stuffs I encountered on the interwebs that touch, move, inspire, or simply make me snort-laugh.
C’est moi (:06)
Just six seconds of what I look like every time I contemplate going outside.
Feeling lighter (maybe a minute? Instgram refuses to say)
I dunno how long this is because Instagram never gives the duration. But it’s such a lovely minute. Turn up the volume. You’ll be glad you did. We’re all carrying a little too much these days. Much of it isn’t ours.
Confidence, explained (2:24)
It makes sense, y’all. I’ve been saying for a while now that waiting to feel confident is a losing proposition. Do the thing. Whatever it is, take the action. Then you have proof that you did it, even if it wasn’t as perfect as you’d imagined. That’s how confidence stacks.
Prompt O’ the Week
Make the Job Description Speak Human
One of you wrote this in the survey:
“I am baffled on what transferable skills I possess for other jobs and all the new ‘cross functional’ corp lingo does not help.”
Oh, I felt that.
A job description can take something you’ve done for fifteen years, put a blazer on it, rename it “cross-functional stakeholder alignment,” and have you questioning whether you’ve ever accomplished a damn thing.
Let’s make it tell the truth.
ROLE
Act as a plain-English job description translator and experienced recruiter. You understand that capable women often describe the work they carried as “just part of the job,” while job postings dress ordinary work in inflated corporate language.
OBJECTIVE
Compare the job description with my actual work history. Translate the jargon, identify the transferable skills I already have, and show me where my experience matches what the employer is asking for.
CONTEXT
I am considering this role:
[PASTE THE JOB DESCRIPTION]
Here is my resume, LinkedIn profile, or an unpolished dump of work I have done:
[PASTE IT HERE]
Treat work I led, fixed, organized, taught, influenced, coordinated, simplified, or made possible as evidence, whether my title named it or not.
Use only the information I provide. Flag anything you cannot support. Never invent achievements, titles, numbers, or skills.
OUTPUT
Give me:
1. The job description in plain English. Tell me what this person would actually do all day.
2. A table with three columns: “Their phrase,” “What it means,” and “Evidence from my experience.”
3. My five strongest transferable skills for this role, with the specific evidence behind each one.
4. Two honest resume bullets for each of the three strongest matches, using my facts and natural language.
5. A separate list of real experience gaps and jargon gaps.
6. Three questions that could uncover evidence I may have forgotten to include.Apply it this week
Choose one job you nearly closed because the description sounded like it required a genetically engineered LinkedIn person.
Paste in the description and your messy work history. Read the jargon gaps before you decide you don’t qualify.
Want to go deeper?
Run it against three roles that interest you. Then ask AI to name the skills that show up across all three.
Those repetitions can help you see what kind of work you’re actually hunting for, even when the titles are all over the damn place.
The Scoop, The Skinny, The Lowdown
Three quick hits, every week. The Scoop: one AI word, decoded. The Skinny: one move you can steal today. The Lowdown: one tool, one honest verdict, from my own use. A word, a move, a verdict. In and out.
THE SCOOP
Slop
You’ve seen it.
A 1,400-word article that says nothing. A woman with six fingers selling shampoo she is somehow holding behind her own wrist. A LinkedIn post with seventeen rocket emojis and no detectable human thought.
AI slop is the mass-produced stuff made with AI and shoved into the world without anybody thinking, checking, editing, or caring.
AI can be part of damn good work. I use it constantly.
Slop is what happens when the human skips their part.
THE SKINNY
Show me your assumptions
You ask AI to build a workshop plan. It quietly decides you have 50 people, 90 minutes, and a room full of beginners.
None of that came from you.
Before you use the answer, ask:
“What did you assume because I didn’t tell you? List each assumption and tell me how it affected your answer.”
Correct the ones that matter, then have it redo the work.
AI will fill every blank you leave. This makes it show you what it poured in.
THE LOWDOWN
This week: Gemini / Nano Banana 2
I use Gemini almost entirely for image generation and, honestly, in some things it is actually better than ChatGPT.
Yes, I said it.
I pay $20 a month, which feels like a lot for what is mostly my image-making machine.
But when I’m doing anything in Google Workspace and my brain goes Whut?, Gemini is the one I open. If you live in Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Sheets, it really is the best tool. It already knows the neighborhood.
And with ChatGPT retiring custom GPTs (don’t even get me started), Gemini Gems can give you essentially the same experience: saved instructions, reference files, and a repeatable helper ready whenever you need it.
Cost: I pay $20 a month.
The catch: That’s a lot when I mostly use it for pictures.
Verdict: Worth my $20. Better at some images, best inside Google Workspace, and now a perfectly good place to rebuild the GPTs ChatGPT is taking away.
What’s Coming Up
Prompt Along: AI Improv
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 6:30PM-7:30PM CT (Complimentary)
Prompt Along: AI Improv is my free monthly hour where we play with AI out loud, together. You bring the questions. You bring the curiosity. You bring that one tough problem you've been poking at for three weeks. And we prompt our way through it, live.
Em & Deb Shoot the Sh!t (LIVE on LinkedIn)
Thursday, September 24 | 11AM CT/12PM ET
Free. No slides, no agenda. Bring coffee, bring your grudges.
Here's what happens. Emily answers one question about recruiters and ends up telling you something nobody else will, plus a story about her dad the psychologist who hypnotized his students into forgetting the number 5. Deb, Head of Human-AI Shenanigans, drops prompts in the chat and then sets off the fireworks because she found the button. Somebody swears. Usually Emily.
You told us you're stuck on networking, interviewing, and finding jobs worth applying to. So we built something. We tell you what it is, then take questions until Emily has to run to a meeting.
Watch, lurk, or yell at us in the chat. Nobody here is behind.
That’s it for this week.
Before I climb down from the carousel...
During Tooling Tuesday with AI-Powered Women, I had 30 minutes to show them what AI can do.
So naturally, we built an app.
You give it a few details, choose how weird you want things to get, and it writes your out-of-office message.
The weirdness escalates. As it should.
My completely honest out-of-office reason this week: sleeping for 12 hours because my body finally overruled my calendar.
What would yours be?
Hit reply and tell me. Bonus points if you let the app make it weird.
💜
Take care of yourself, take care of each other,
Deb