The mistake almost everyone makes

A weak prompt looks like this:

write me a cv

Vague in, vague out. The AI has to guess what you mean, and it guesses generic. You get something bland that could belong to anyone.

The big idea: AI gives you back the quality of what you put in. A short, lazy question gets a short, lazy answer. A clear, detailed request gets something you can actually use.

It is a conversation, not a vending machine

• Vending-machine thinking: type once, take whatever drops out, give up if it is wrong.
• Conversation thinking: ask, read, then say "make it shorter", "more formal", "add an example". Keep going until it is right.

The people who get the most out of AI are not the ones who know secret tricks. They are the ones who treat it like a thoughtful conversation.

Your turn

Take a weak prompt you might normally type, like "write a cover letter for a job", and just notice how generic the result is. We are about to fix that in the next lesson.