Learning to Ask Better Questions

The Goal

By the end of this chapter you will be able to write a clear request — a prompt — that gets a useful result on the first or second try. You will know the five building blocks of a good prompt, a handful of techniques that work with every assistant, and how to get honest criticism instead of polite praise.

Understand: why the question decides the answer

In Chapter 2 you learned that the AI predicts the most likely answer to what you wrote. That means: a vague question gets the most average answer. A precise question gets an answer that fits you.

The skill of writing good prompts is not a trick. It is the same skill as giving a good task to a person: say what you want, for whom, why, and what “good” looks like.