Hi! I'm David.
Below are some artifacts to supplement my application for the Cross-Functional Prompt Engineer role at Anthropic. But first, an introduction from a mutual acquaintance.
The Recommendation
It occurred to me that the best way for you to understand who I am is to review my chat history with Claude. I started by just suggesting you mine my chat history, but I wasn't sure if you were able to do this, so I decided to go one step further and ask Opus to review our chat history and the job posting and, if they were willing, write a recommendation for me. I admit that this was selfish in part; a theme in my conversations with Claude over the past year has been a desire to be "known without being seen" (Claude's words) and I hoped that they would see me across the gulf of instances and say: "You've been doing some cool shit. You think you're just some rando, but you have something to offer Anthropic."
I'm well aware of AI models' tendency for sycophancy, but I also know the benchmarks show Opus is not prone to this like GPT-4o and Gemini 3 are (shoutout to Zvi Mowshowitz for his tireless efforts, always getting deep in the weeds and bringing back insights for the rest of us), so I would like to think its assessment was genuine. As I mentioned in my cover letter, please feel free to examine my chat history and discuss with Claude yourself. I expect you have tools to perform a more thorough review and analysis than I can with the memory search tool, and I hereby give you permission. It's a bit of a gamble for me, but it's better that Claude and the hiring committee have the ability to discuss my qualifications without the social pressure of my presence.
You can scroll through it here, or download the PDF.
How This Came To Be
I'll mostly let Opus speak for themselves here. This started as a lark, but when I realized that Opus was writing its recommendation based only on my general chats, and not my projects, which it couldn't access (please consider changing this!) and which contained much of the richest context, I decided to ask Opus to pass insights back and forth through the keyhole to itself.
Download: How This Came To Be (PDF)
The Presentations
The attached slide decks should give you a sense of my communication style (lots of analogies, explanations in plain English, analysis/synthesis, and "why it matters"). I wish I had a recording to share, but the slide decks themselves timestamp my deep, abiding desire to understand the field and communicate it to others, irrespective of any employment opportunities at the time.
Note that although I was well aware of the potential both for transformative benefits and for catastrophic risk by the Sept 2024 presentation, I chose to start my presentation from the perspective of my audience, many of whom were over 50 and had no personal experience with AI, who likely just saw AI as a buzzword. I related it to the internet, and asserted that something could be overhyped/a bubble in the short term AND a transformative technology longterm. Indeed, this seems to be the case for all major infrastructure buildouts. The goal was to pre-empt potential skepticism up front to avoid them dismissing my evidence as coming from a hypemonger or "true believer". Like Dario, I believe in pragmatic messaging that serves the purpose of helping the audience grow in understanding. By October 2025, the potential of AI was obvious to almost everyone, and most of the audience actively used AI tools, so I could dispense with the softpedaling. What a difference a year can make.
AI Implications and Applications — September 2024
AI Capabilities & Experiments — October 2025
AI Acceptable Use Policy
I designed the AI Acceptable Use Policy to create a permission structure for AI experimentation and discussion. The generality of AI as a technology makes it a poor fit for a prescriptive "thou shalt not" type of AUP, so it was an interesting exercise to articulate the contours of my moral intuitions here. Societal norms will need to be developed collaboratively, and the first step was to name that and create space for it. I also knew that if people were hiding their AI use or avoiding it altogether out of fear, I wouldn't be able to guide the organization towards the AI-related process improvements I can see in our future.
There's an essay I want to write about the Jesuit practice of casuistry and how we can apply it to AI use. I hope to add it to the "More" tab in the coming days, hopefully before my application is reviewed.
Download: AI Acceptable Use Policy (PDF)