LESSON 02
A LAZY PROMPT GETS
A LAZY ANSWER.
Most people's disappointing results are not a limitation of the tool. They are the predictable output of a nine-word question typed into a box with no context attached.
Prompting is not a trick. It is delegation, written down.
The delegation test
Here is the mental model that fixes most of it. Imagine handing the same task to a capable new hire on their first morning. Sharp, fast, well-read, and they know nothing about your business, your market, your customers or your preferences.
You would not walk to their desk and say 'write a follow-up email' and walk away. You would tell them who it is going to, what happened on the call, what you want to happen next, how long it should be, and what your emails normally sound like. Then you would expect a usable draft.
That is the entire skill. Every complaint about AI output being generic is a complaint about a briefing that was generic. The model cannot supply specifics you withheld, so it fills the gap with the statistical middle of everything it has ever read, which is exactly what bland writing is.
The five parts
Role
Who it should be while answering. An experienced acquisitions manager. A careful proofreader. A skeptical operations consultant. This narrows the register and the assumptions.
Context
The facts of the situation. Who is involved, what already happened, what you are trying to accomplish, what the constraints are in the real world.
Constraints
What it must and must not do. Length. Tone. Things to avoid. Whether it should ask you questions before answering rather than guessing.
Format
What the output should physically look like. Bullet list. Three paragraphs. A table with these columns. An email with a subject line.
Example
A sample of what good looks like. One previous email you were happy with does more than three paragraphs of describing the tone you want.
The material
Not a sixth rule so much as the thing people forget. Paste the transcript, the notes, the document. Bring the source.
You will not use all five every time. A quick rewrite needs two. Anything you are going to send to a customer needs all of them, and it still takes under two minutes to write once you have done it a dozen times.
This is one piece of a bigger picture; the free learning community has the rest.
Lazy versus real, side by side
The lazy version, which is what most people type:
Write a follow-up email to a seller who didn't respond.
Ben Lovro
You will get something serviceable and forgettable. Enthusiastic, slightly salesy, full of phrases like reaching out and circling back, and indistinguishable from what every other person who typed that sentence received.
The real version:
You are an acquisitions manager at a South Carolina home-buying company. Eleven days ago I walked a property in West Columbia with the owner. Her mother passed in March, the house needs a roof and the kitchen is dated, and two siblings have to agree on any sale. I gave her a cash number and she said she needed to talk to her brother. No response since. Write a follow-up email. Four sentences maximum. Warm, not pushy, no sales language. Acknowledge that this is a family decision and there is no deadline pressure from me. Close with one specific question that is easy to answer with one line. Here is an email I sent a different seller that worked well, for tone: [paste].
Same tool. Same two seconds of processing. The second one produces something you might actually send, because it contains the information a competent person would have needed to write it.
A skeleton you can reuse
Keep this somewhere you can paste from. Fill in the brackets.
- Role: You are [role] with experience in [domain].
- Task: I need you to [one specific verb and object].
- Context: Here is the situation. [Who, what happened, what you want to happen, what limits exist.]
- Material: Here is what you are working from. [Paste the transcript, notes, document or data.]
- Constraints: [Length. Tone. Things to avoid. What not to assume.]
- Format: Return it as [structure].
- Check: If anything important is missing, ask me before you write it.
That last line is the most underused instruction available and it costs nothing. Without it, a model handed an incomplete brief will invent the missing pieces and proceed, because proceeding is what it does. With it, you often get three questions back that are exactly the three things you forgot to say.
Iterate instead of restarting
The first output is a draft. Treat it the way you would treat a draft from a person, which means you respond to it rather than throwing it away and rephrasing your original request.
Useful follow-ups: cut it by half. Drop the second paragraph. That sounds like marketing, make it sound like a person. You assumed the price is negotiable, it is not, redo it. Give me two more versions with different opening lines.
Two or three rounds of that will land somewhere a single perfect prompt usually will not, and it is faster than trying to anticipate everything up front. The conversation is the tool. Most people use one turn of it.
Build a prompt library, not a prompt collection
There is a difference, and it matters.
A collection is a hundred prompts you downloaded from someone else and have never opened. A library is eight to twelve prompts you wrote for work you actually do repeatedly, that you have refined three times each because you noticed what they kept getting wrong.
For most owners the library is small and boring. Summarize a seller call into the five things that matter. Turn walkthrough notes into a scope of work. Draft the standard follow-up. Rewrite this so a customer can understand it. Pull the action items out of this meeting. Those five, used weekly, will outproduce any downloaded pack, because they carry your context and your standards.
Keep them in a plain document. When one produces a bad output, fix the prompt rather than the output. That is the compounding part.
Frequently asked
Questions people actually ask
Do I really need to tell it to act as a role?
It is the cheapest of the five and it does measurably narrow the register and the assumptions. It is not magic, and it will not make it competent at something it is not. Context and the source material do more work than role does.
How long should a prompt be?
As long as the briefing would be if you were handing the task to a new hire. For a quick rewrite that is one line. For anything going to a customer it is a paragraph, plus the material pasted underneath.
Should I be polite to it?
It does not care. Writing in complete, clear sentences does help, because clear writing carries more usable structure than clipped fragments. Politeness is a side effect of that, not the cause.
Are prompt packs worth buying?
Almost never. The value is in prompts written around your own context and refined on your own work. A downloaded pack is somebody else's context, which is the one ingredient it cannot supply.
Why do I get different answers to the same question?
There is deliberate variation in how these systems generate text, so identical input can produce different output. That is fine for drafting and it is a reason never to rely on one run of anything factual.
What is the single highest-value habit here?
Ending your prompt with an instruction to ask you questions if anything important is missing. It converts a confident guess into a short conversation, and the questions it asks will usually be the ones you should have answered up front.
Make your next move
A year from now, what will you be glad you started today?
You don't need another promise that everything will be easy. You need something useful to learn — and a next step you're willing to take.