Your first genuinely useful prompt

Most people's first disappointing AI experience has the same cause. They typed something like "write me a report on climate change," got back four paragraphs of bland Wikipedia-flavoured text, and concluded the tool was overhyped.

The tool did exactly what was asked. "Write me a report on climate change" describes ten thousand possible documents, so it produced the statistical average of all of them, which is, by definition, generic. Generic input, generic output. The fix is not magic words. It is specificity.

The four ingredients

A prompt that works almost always contains four things. You do not need to label them or put them in order: you just need them present.

• Role, who is writing, and to whom. 'You are a secondary school science teacher writing for parents.'
• Task: the specific verb. Not 'help with' but 'summarise', 'rewrite', 'compare', 'draft', 'critique'.
• Context: the situation the output has to fit. Who reads it, what they already know, what came before, what must be avoided.
• Format: length, structure, tone. 'Three short paragraphs, warm but professional, no bullet points.'

The same request, twice

The second is longer to type and produces something you might actually send. That trade is almost always worth it, and note that nothing in the strong version is a trick. It is just the information a competent human would have needed to do the job.

The test that fixes most bad prompts

Before you send a prompt, ask: could a capable new colleague do this well with only what I have written? If they would have to come back and ask you a question, the model will not ask; it will guess, silently, and you will get the consequences of that guess.

This one test catches the majority of weak prompts, because the missing ingredient is nearly always context you have in your head and forgot was not on the page.

Two habits worth forming now

Show, do not just tell. If you have an example of what good looks like — a previous email, a paragraph in your voice, a report in the right format — paste it in and say "match this style." One example is worth several sentences of description, because you almost certainly cannot articulate your own writing style accurately, but you can recognise it.

State the negatives. Models drift toward corporate filler by default. "No bullet points. Do not use the words 'delve', 'leverage' or 'robust'. Do not open with a summary of what I just asked" costs you one line and removes the three things you would otherwise edit out by hand every time.