How to come up with super-smart AI prompts

--> you'll kick yourself when you find out

When I first started looking seriously at AI for writing I did what most people do - I searched around to find everything I could on the best prompts. Bought a few courses too.

When I saw the depth and complexity of what others were using as prompts I was a bit overawed. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to come up with anything as smart to get what I wanted made.

But it turns out that with trial and error, all of us can iterate our way to very decent prompts.

And there’s a sneaky trick to it too. One that makes it way easier to prompt an AI to do what you want…

Ask it what it needs from you.

Sounds obvious when I write it, but it took me an age to figure it out.

It doesn’t always get it right, but more often than not if you tell your AI what you’d like it to do and ask it what it needs to know from you to do it, it’ll make a decent fist of it.

For example, a while ago I was spending a lot of time trying to get Claude to write in a more interesting style that was more like my newsletters. I tried all sorts of prompts with very variable results.

Then it struck me - I already had the perfect resource.

I’ve spent the last year or so creating newsletter email templates for subscribers to tweak and adapt by injecting their own stories, insights and experiences.

Surely if Claude could follow one of my templates it would create a newsletter very much in my style.

But how could I prompt it to follow my template format?

The answer was simple: just feed the template in and ask it what it needed to know from me to write the email.

Despite my atrocious spelling, Claude told me exactly what it needed to know from me to write a newsletter following my “Beat Your Demon” template.

Now you might argue that by providing the problem, its impact, the target audience, my personal experiences, 3-5 tips and my relevant products that I was doing all the work.

Surely since I was providing all the ”meat” in the newsletter I might as well just write it all myself anyway?

It turns out that - for me at least - that’s 100% not the case.

I find it an order of magnitude easier to just dump my thoughts and examples into Claude and get it to write a first draft than I do to write that draft myself.

And the same is true for almost everyone I’ve spoken to. Getting a decent first draft (or even a crappy one) is by far the hardest part of writing.

But once you have the first draft in front of you it’s then pretty easy to edit and tweak until you get something you like.

In this case, for example, Claude’s initial draft was something like 70-80% of the way there. There were a few phrases I didn’t like. And it felt like Claude was trying just a bit too hard to be quirky and funny.

But overall it took the task of writing the email down to just a few minutes. A major result.

We’ll talk next time about how to make AI-generated emails feel more like ones you’d write yourself.

But for now, next time you struggle knowing what prompt to use, just ask.

“I’d like you to do X. What do you need to know from me to be able to do it?”.

Oh. And if you subscribe to my template packs, do feel free to feed any of them in to your favourite AI and ask it what it needs to write an email of that type.

- Ian