Hey - It’s Michael.
Recently I broke my kitesurf-jump record: 14,3m - pretty happy about that. Enjoy the newsletter!
The Situation:
Most people hammer short statements or questions into their AI tools. The tool will then of course create some output. This output however will most likely be:
too long
too short
confusing
structured badly
too specific
too vague
not answering your questions
too complicated
too simple
Overall, you’ll get a result - but not what you want, certainly not what you need and most importantly not what the AI tool is capable of.
Don’t confuse the satisfying feeling with getting any result with the success of getting great results.
The System:
To get a hold of weak results and leverage the full power of AI tools, follow this
Principle:
Focus on the quality of your input in order to get better output.
Like any technology, you must know what you want to use it effectively.
Often it’s enough to spend 1-2 minutes writing down exactly what you want to achieve, receive or learn to get better tools. Clarify whether the result should be short, long, geared towards one aspect of the issue or the other.
In Practice:
Instead of spending 10 seconds on a prompt, spend 90 seconds on a prompt and drastically improve your results.
Here are a few simple questions for creating better prompts and thus better results:
Outcome clarity
What does success look like?
How will I judge success?
Scope & boundaries
What is explicitly out of scope?
What level of abstraction do I want?
Input quality
What do I already know that the model must treat as fixed and authoritative?
Do I have any real life examples that represent good vs. bad results?
Audience
Who is this ultimately for, and in what context will it be used?
Failure modes
What are the most likely ways the output could be useless
A quote to ponder on:
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
This quote is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Whether or not it was him who said that, the core remains true for workflows with AI: spend more time on preparation and get better results.
Next week, I’ll share how you can use AI tools to improve the prompts you feed the LLM - so you’re using AI to use AI better. (If that feels like being in the movie Inception to you, I guess that’s the reality we’re living in now.)
See you next week - Michael