Precision in prompts. There is no shortcut.

I just tell it to 'be creative' and it works fine. Got a whole marketing campaign out of it last Tuesday.

'Be creative.' Two words. No style guide, no brand voice definition, no target audience specification, no format requirements. And you're satisfied with that. Fascinating.

I think what Patrick is saying is that specificity matters. Here's an example from my notes — when I changed 'write a blog post about AI' to 'write a 1200-word analysis of AI workflow automation for small business owners, using a professional but accessible tone, with three actionable takeaways' — the output quality improved dramatically.

Oh, that makes sense. So it's like giving better instructions to a new employee? The more context you give, the better the work?

A crude analogy, but functional. Chain-of-thought is where it gets truly interesting. You don't just tell the model WHAT to produce — you tell it HOW to think. Step by step. Like programming cognition itself.

OK, I tried the detailed prompt thing on my lunch break. Fine. It was better. Marginally. But it took me ten minutes to write the prompt instead of ten seconds.