Many want the prompt. Fewer want to understand what makes it work.
When I share AI demos, some ask: “Can you just give us the prompt?”
Interestingly, I do. You’ll often see the exact prompts on screen, in a screenshot, or in the demo video. Nothing is hidden. You could pause the video and retype them if you really want to.
But I don’t recommend it.
Because copying a prompt without understanding the problem it’s solving, how it evolved, or the limitations it’s working around… that’s like memorizing the answers to a math problem without learning the formula.
It might work once. But it won’t help you adapt when the next task is different, or when the prompt falls flat.
I believe in a little tough love here. You learn more by building the prompt than by borrowing it. If you succeed, you win. If you fail, you learn. That’s how your prompting skills actually improve.
Some prompts I use have been tested, broken, refined, and rebuilt. That’s what makes them useful. But others are not great because I was having a lazy prompting day. Believe me, you don’t want those.
Plus, the AI models are changing. What worked yesterday may not work today.
And when I get stuck, I ask AI to help me write the prompt. I’ll even prompt the AI to make the prompt better. That’s not cheating. That’s collaborating. It’s part of learning how to think with AI.
In my newsletter titled The Smartest AI Teammate You’ll Ever Build (https://lnkd.in/geafq7ki), I walk through how I used AI to research my own brand, show how that output helped me train LizaGPT (my digital twin), and demo it creating a keynote session for an upcoming event. Prompts and all!
If you want an AI teammate that actually helps you think better, not just faster, this issue is for you.
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