- You don’t need to “engineer” your AI prompts—just ask clearly.
- AI tools are getting better at understanding real language.
- Giving background and asking for a specific result goes a long way.
Do you spend more time thinking of the right AI prompt than getting the answer you need? You’re not alone. You don’t need expert AI skills or fancy phrases to get the results you want.
AI tools are getting better at understanding natural language every day, so AI prompts don’t need to be engineered. Instead, you can just ask for what you need.
What Prompt Engineering Really Means (and Why You Don’t Need It)
Scroll around TikTok for a little while, and you’ll see all kinds of videos telling you to copy an AI prompt to change your life, make a fortune overnight, or whatever the creator is pushing at the moment. (We all know these things don’t really work, right?) The prompts these creators want you to copy typically begin with phrases like “Act like you’re a productivity coach,” and often include extensive descriptions.
That’s prompt engineering. More specifically, it involves crafting carefully worded requests designed to elicit a precise response.
But you don’t have to have fancy phrases to get the answers you need. AI is getting better at understanding your request when you ask just like you would speak to a friend. It’s like when search engines were first introduced. You had to use special ‘search operators’—like putting quotation marks around a specific phrase to find exactly that phrase—to get the best results.
You no longer have to do that. Search operators are a thing of the past. You just tell a search engine what you want, and it throws results back at you, usually very successfully (it’s almost like search engines can read your mind).
AI is following the same pattern, but at a much faster pace. Each new release of an AI tool enhances its ability to comprehend your questions, regardless of how you phrase them. And if you’re using an AI that has a memory function, it will dramatically improve with use as it ‘learns’ what results you’re looking for based on how you ask a question, feedback you’ve provided, and information you’ve shared with it. Even when you’re not allowing the AI company to use your data to train other models, it’s still learning to respond to you based on your past interactions.
How to Get Better AI Results Without Overthinking Prompts
One recent example of how AI works today is a question that I posed to it:
Can you give me some underrated, non-obvious ideas for how to use an ipad in the kitchen to make cooking and/or meal prepping easier?
What I got in return was a list of ideas I haven’t even considered, like: “Use it with an app to inventory your ingredients and determine the best meal to cook on the fly.” Or, “Use voice memos when you tweak a recipe so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to record the changes.”
Luis Alvarez / Getty Images
Even though these improvements are happening quickly, there are still some strategies you can use to make your prompts work best: Give the AI some background and be specific about what you want.
- Background: Provide enough information for the AI to provide the type of answer you’re looking for. For example, instead of saying “give me time-saving tips,” you can say “I work full time. What are some time-saving tips for getting my family out the door in the morning without tears or fighting?”
- Deliverable: What you want is as important as the background you provide. For example, instead of “give me time-saving tips,” you’ll probably find more useful information if you say, “I need non-obvious, practical time-saving strategies for getting my family out the door in the morning without a lot of drama.”
Optionally, you can also prompt your AI to use a specific tone in its response, especially if you’re looking for something different from your everyday conversation. Say you’re using the example above to create a quick guide for other busy moms in your parenting group. In that case, you could tack on a phrase like, “In a friendly tone, provide some non-obvious tips for busy parents who are trying to reduce the chaos of getting out of the house in the morning.” The resulting list will probably need some tweaking, but you’ll have a great place to start from.
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