What's sabotaging your AI results?

You type one line, get a mediocre answer, and conclude AI is overrated. But the model isn't guessing badly — it's guessing exactly as well as one line allows.

• The tell Your best results feel like luck, and “be better” is your main revision strategy.
• The cost Every vague prompt costs you two or three follow-ups. That's the time you think AI isn't saving.
• The fix Context plus one example, every time. It's one habit, it takes a week, and it fixes most of this.

Your prompting is fine — your filter is off. Confident, fluent, wrong answers sail straight through you and into your work, and you only find out when someone else does.

• The tell You've been burned by a fact, number, or citation that looked completely legitimate.
• The cost One caught error costs a minute. One uncaught error costs your credibility.
• The fix A ten-second rule: anything specific and checkable — names, numbers, claims — gets verified before it ships.

You have one favourite AI and it does everything — drafting, research, math, images. Some of those it wins; the rest it survives. The gap you're feeling is casting, not capability.

• The tell The same tool feels brilliant on Monday and useless on Wednesday — depending on the task.
• The cost You're grading AI on its worst subject and missing what the right tool does in one try.
• The fix Learn each tool's home turf once — two minutes of matching beats an hour of prompting uphill.

You've had brilliant AI moments — and no idea how to have them again. Every task starts from a blank prompt, so your hundredth session is no faster than your first.

• The tell You've retyped essentially the same prompt more times than you'd like to admit.
• The cost Compounding, in reverse. Practice makes everyone else faster; a blank page keeps you at day one.
• The fix Save every prompt that works, today. A week of that is a library; a month of it is a workflow.