Why the way you write your prompt changes everything

The most common mistake in early AI use is treating the prompt like a search query. It is not. A prompt is a context — and the difference between an unusable answer and a brilliant one is usually a few sentences of framing that most people skip.

Attention is the whole game

Modern language models do not “look up” answers. They allocate attention across the words you give them and predict what should come next. Every word in your prompt is a vote for what the model should weight more heavily — and silence on a topic is a vote for the model’s prior, which is the average of the internet.

[Migration in progress — full article body to be brought across from the original Notion source. The original includes a worked example with attention diagrams that should be preserved.]

The four lever moves

• Role. Tell the model who it should be writing as.
• Constraints. Tell the model what not to do, not just what to do.
• Audience. Tell the model who is going to read this and why.
• Examples. Show, don’t tell. One worked example beats a paragraph of instructions.