How to prompt like an expert (while staying lazy)

If AI keeps letting you down, I’ve got bad news. It’s probably not the AI. It’s you.

I say that with love. It was me too.

Here’s what we all do. We ask ChatGPT something the way we’d Google it. Or we toss it a vague, half-formed request and expect it to read our minds. Then we get annoyed when it doesn’t get us.

So we decide AI is overhyped. That it just spits out bland, generic mush.

But most of the time, the tool isn’t the problem. The question is.

AI doesn’t guess. Give it three vague words and you get three vague words back, just longer. It fills the blanks with average, and average is exactly what’s letting you down.

And it’s not free. You pay in time and patience. You get stuck in endless back-and-forth trying to be understood, and it usually ends one of two ways: you give up with nothing you can use, or you blow through your message limit before you even get an answer. Especially on a free plan.

So here’s my little freebie. It’s built for lazy people like me.

You don’t need to learn how to “prompt properly.” You don’t need to become an expert. You just ask the AI to write the prompt for you.

Yes, really. Instead of racking your brain for the perfect wording, you type something like:

“Write me a prompt for [what you want], and ask me any questions you need before you answer.”

That’s the whole trick. Two things happen. The AI writes you a clean, complete prompt, way better than whatever you’d have dashed off. And before it does, it interviews you to fill in the gaps. What’s your budget? How many days, and who with? Who’s the email for, and what tone? It goes and gets what it needs instead of making it up.

Quick example. You want a meal plan for the week. The lazy-but-useless way: “give me a menu for the week.” You’ll get something generic, with quinoa nobody’s going to eat. The smarter way: “write me a prompt for a weekly meal plan, and ask me your questions first.” Now it wants to know how many people, who hates what, your budget, how much time you’ve got to cook. What comes out actually fits your life.

Me? This changed mine. No exaggeration.

And it’s just my way of doing it. The beauty is that once you start, you’ll find your own. The version that fits how your brain works. There’s no one right way here. There’s yours, and you find it by messing around.

This is just the front door, by the way. Once you’re comfortable, you can push further: give the AI a role (“talk to me like my accountant,” “explain this like I’m five”), tell it how to talk to you. But that’s a whole other post.

Because really, you’re not just handing off the task. You’re handing off the work of asking the right question in the first place. And asking good questions happens to be the one thing AI is genuinely great at. So let it.

Try it once today, on anything. You’ll see the difference in the very first reply.

And if this one little habit changes things for you at home… imagine a whole team that stops fighting with vague requests.

Free, like I said.

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