Let the AI attack your draft before anyone else does

The most valuable thing an AI assistant does for many experienced staff is not drafting. It is disagreeing.

Ask a model to "review" your draft and you will mostly get praise and a few tidy-ups. Models lean towards being agreeable. Give it a role with a reason to be hard on you, and the answer changes completely. It goes looking for the gap in your logic, the number that doesn't reconcile, the promise you can't keep.

One example

Before a funding brief goes up the line, paste it in with this:

You are a sceptical member of a Senate Estimates committee. You have read the brief below and you want to find the weakest point in it. Ask me the five hardest questions you would ask the agency head, in order of how damaging a poor answer would be. For each, say what in the brief prompted it. Do not rewrite the brief and do not soften the questions.

What you get back is a rehearsal. Some questions will be unfair or off-target; ignore those. Usually one or two land, and they are almost always about something you half-knew was thin: an assumption with no source, a cost that hides a second-year cost, a benefit nobody has measured.

Fix the brief, not the answer. If a question exposes a gap, close the gap in the document, then run the prompt again to see what comes up next.

Why it works

A role gives the model permission to be critical and a point of view to criticise from. "Find the weakest point" stops it spreading its attention evenly across trivia. Asking it not to rewrite keeps the judgement with you.

The same idea works with other reviewers: opposing counsel, a procurement evaluator, an unhappy customer, a CFO, a privacy regulator, a plain-language editor. Members can find a set of eight paste-ready reviewer prompts, with notes on what to do with each kind of output, in Make the AI argue with you in the Prompting section.

One caution. If the draft contains personal or sensitive information, choose the matching classification label before you paste it, the same as for any other prompt.