“Most take-home submissions look the same because people are prompting for a good take-home instead of feeding the AI their real decisions, constraints, and voice. I teach the same thing for content: same tool, wildly different output once you give it something specific to work from.”

“Most take-home submissions look identical because people are feeding the same prompts into the same models and calling it a portfolio. I review applications for retreats and hiring, and the ones that stand out are never the polished deck: they are the weird video, the broken link I forgive because the person is clearly real, or the detail that only they could have made.”

“I’ve been writing short, spaced-out LinkedIn posts for ten years manually, and now people flag that exact format as AI. If everything looks the same, it’s usually because everyone is prompting the same way, not because good style suddenly became AI. The real tell is whether there’s a lived opinion behind it; format is just the easiest thing to copy.”

“Most take-homes look the same because the same prompts are circulating, and people treat them as copy-paste exercises rather than thinking tools. I see it in job postings too: clean, 2024-shaped, and instantly forgettable. The real signal is whether the person rebuilt the work or just polished it.”

“It's both, and the problem is companies now punish the human parts. I got a PM take-home that banned AI, then the feedback came back reading like ChatGPT. Good style got flattened because everyone is optimizing for the same safe shape.”

“AI has made the generic look effortless, but the real problem is that most people stop at the first draft. I teach writers to use AI for brainstorming and rough structure, then push past the predictable with their own voice, their own point, and a real sense of the reader.”