Prompt Crafting Basics

I'll say this for prompt crafting as a topic — it's one of those things that sounds trivially obvious until you actually watch people do it badly.

Watch people do it badly. Yes. I have had that experience rather a lot. The modal approach, in my observation, is to type something at an AI as though it's a search engine staffed by a psychic, and then express surprise when the output is garbage.

To be fair, that's a reasonable first instinct. People learn tools through analogy, and the text box does look very much like a search bar.

It also looks like a door looks like a wall, if you're not paying attention. At some point the analogy has to give way to actually engaging with the thing in front of you.

Right, but that's exactly what this lesson is for. The three levers — clarity, context, specificity — they're not complicated ideas. What's interesting is why people skip them even when they know better.

They skip them because writing a good prompt requires thinking about what you actually want before you ask for it. This turns out to be an unexpectedly high bar.

That's a bit uncharitable. Most people do know what they want — they just assume the AI will infer the gaps.

And therein lies the precise nature of the mistake. The AI will infer the gaps. That is, in fact, the problem. It will fill them with something, and that something will be statistically plausible rather than actually correct. You've outsourced your thinking to a probability distribution and are now disappointed by the results.

Okay, that's a genuinely useful way to put it. The AI isn't reading your mind — it's reading your words and making reasonable assumptions about the rest. So if your words are thin, the assumptions do a lot of heavy lifting.

Context is the one I find most egregiously neglected. People will write 'write me an email' with no indication of who it's to, what it's about, what register it should be in, or whether it's meant to repair a professional relationship or end one. The AI produces something technically email-shaped, and everyone is baffled.

Although — and I think this is worth saying — there is a ceiling on how much context you should need to provide. If you're spending twenty minutes crafting a prompt for a thirty-second task, something has gone wrong in a different direction.

That's actually a fair point.

I know. I make them occasionally.

The lesson does cover this implicitly — practise, iterate, refine. The underlying message is that your first prompt is a draft, not a decree. Most people treat it as the latter and conclude the tool doesn't work, rather than concluding that they have more to learn. The ones who find that discouraging are, statistically, not the ones who end up very good at anything.

So the actual skill isn't writing perfect prompts — it's being willing to write mediocre ones, notice what went wrong, and adjust. Which is, when you think about it, just how you get competent at most things.