Like It or Not, You Will Be Versioned by AI
“Versioned” = revised, upgraded, or remixed—often without your consent.
Everyone and everything will be versioned now—especially you.
There’s a new kind of power in the world—quiet, fast, and addictive. It doesn’t arrive with a bang or a headline. It slips in through your browser, a prompt box, a subtle suggestion to try a better version. And it’s no longer limited to documents or code. You can version a café menu, a company webpage, a personal growth strategy, even a construction-site. Most unsettling of all: you can version yourself—and others will do it to you whether you invite them or not.
Let me show you how it starts.
The Coffee-Shop Menu
I snapped a picture of a friend’s café menu and ran it through AI. Within minutes, it came back sharper, groovier, and better optimized—with nearly the same ingredients. It was still their menu… just improved.
Prompt
Act as an experienced restaurant-menu engineer for a groovy New England coffee shop. Using the attached menu as your ingredient list, design a refreshed menu that feels both familiar and exciting: keep, rename, or drop items as you see fit; introduce roughly 50 percent new offerings, but ensure at least 80 percent of each new item’s ingredients already appear on the current menu. Balance local taste preferences, food-cost targets, profit margins, and the practical limits of a small café kitchen, then arrange the final menu in the order customers naturally expect, ready for immediate print.
This will happen to your work. Someone will feed it into a prompt like this—your design, your proposal, your résumé. A few tweaks and a clearer voice, and it won’t be yours anymore—just something better built from the same ingredients.
The Web-Page Rewrite
One of my web pages felt safe and generic, so I handed it to the machine and asked for a merciless teardown. What came back wasn’t critique; it was demolition followed by a rebuild that made my original look outdated by comparison.
Prompt
You are a senior web strategist with a license to be unsparing. Audit the following page as if I’m the founder who wrote it and can’t see my own blind spots. Deliver your findings in six sections—Strategic Alignment, Page Execution, Trust & Credibility, Conversion Path, Brand Consistency, Measurement & Iteration. In each section give direct, jargon-free criticism, then list the precise, prioritized fixes required to reach best-in-class performance.
This will happen to your ideas. The deck you’re polishing? Someone will drop it into a prompt and rebuild it in under 30 seconds—then surge ahead.
The Brutal Growth Audit
Then it got personal. I asked the AI to audit me—my judgment, posture, ambition. The response named excuses, ego traps, wasted hours, and offered a blueprint for performing at a higher standard.
Prompt
You are my no-nonsense strategic growth coach. Evaluate my current leadership and decision-making. Identify the blind spots, unforced errors, and stalled leverage points holding me back. Then prescribe the smallest set of high-impact changes I should implement over the next quarter, ranked by ROI and effort. No comfort, no fluff—just the truth I need to act on.
This will happen to your leadership. Your management style, your philosophy—fair game for versioning. You’ll still be “you,” but someone will prompt a tighter, faster version and present it as the obvious upgrade.
The Construction-Site Breakdown
Finally, I uploaded a job-site photo—just a still frame. The AI returned a punch list of unfinished tasks, safety risks, and subtle deviations from spec.
Prompt
Assume the role of a veteran site inspector. Analyze this image and identify: 1) current state of work, 2) remaining tasks to complete, and 3) non-obvious errors or risks that could compromise quality, safety, or schedule. Provide actionable notes an on-site foreman can use immediately.
This will happen to your process. Your craftsmanship, your decisions in the field, your physical reality—versioned from a snapshot and the right prompt.
This is the future
You will be versioned—by clients, bosses, recruiters, competitors, and eventually by AI itself, proactively and constantly. Everything you publish can be remixed with brutal ease. The better version of you is always just one prompt away.
The real trap isn’t that everything can be versioned; it’s believing you won’t be.
How to Stay Ahead of Your Own Remix
So where does that leave you? The only rational move is to version yourself first—turn critique, revision, and release into a discipline you control instead of a surprise that happens to you.
1. Run pre-emptive drafts. Treat every deliverable like a rolling-release open-source project. Before it leaves your desk, feed it to an AI with the toughest prompts you can imagine, seal the obvious cracks, and ship the stronger version. You’ll neutralize the easy hits outsiders love to score.
2. Add human nuance. Balance machine objectivity with a tight circle of reviewers who understand your goals and voice. Let their context-rich feedback clash with algorithmic polish; the tension reveals what merely looks better versus what truly lands.
3. Mine outside upgrades for skills. Every unsolicited revision—whether from strangers, competitors, or another AI pass—signals a new standard. Identify the underlying competency (sharper argument, cleaner layout, bolder decision), practice it deliberately, and bake it into your next release.
By cycling through ruthless AI critique, trusted human insight, and targeted skill-building, you direct your own evolution instead of reacting to everyone else’s edits. The world may keep versioning you, but it will find fewer easy wins—and more proof that you already hold yourself to the next bar.