Your best prompt is a total mess

Hi {{first_name|friend}},

The least intuitive AI tip I know

Writing to you from the road this week, so this issue is short and useful. The main idea comes from one of the most respected AI researchers alive and it sounds odd at first: your prompts are too neat. Trying this takes a few minutes and I'll show you exactly how.

My Take

Picture one of the best known AI researchers in the world sitting down to use AI. You'd expect surgical precision, a prompt polished like a legal brief. What Andrej Karpathy actually does is lean back, switch to voice and ramble at the thing for ten minutes straight.

Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and ran AI at Tesla. He could engineer the finest prompt on the planet. He describes his actual method as "total mess, anything goes." And the payoff, in his words: the AI's "echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with."

Here's why that works. Typing makes you compress. You tidy the thought before it's finished, you cut the backstory because it feels like too much. All of that was context. The AI needed it, and you deleted it before hitting send.

Talking is actually too fast to edit. The tangents make it in. So does the second thought you had right after the first one. That extra material is what makes an answer fit your situation instead of the average person's.

And you've done a version of this your whole career. Talking a problem through in a meeting, leaving the long voicemail, maybe dictating notes. Thinking out loud is an old skill and now the tools caught up to it.

The mechanics are simple. Every major AI app has a microphone icon in the message box. Tap it and talk. I use a dictation tool called Wispr Flow on my Mac, but the built in mic works fine.

One habit to keep. The AI handles misspellings and wrong grammar on its own, so leave those alone. The only thing worth a scan is a word that flipped your meaning: a dropped "not," a wrong number, a name it heard wrong. Fix those and send the rest as is.

Talking to your computer feels odd for about a week, then it switches to being normal. Next time you catch yourself polishing a prompt, press the mic instead and tell it the whole messy story.

Brett

Try This Today

Give your AI one real task by voice today. Pick something with backstory: a tricky email you owe someone, a decision you keep thinking about or a trip with real constraints.

1. Open ChatGPT or Claude on your phone and start a new chat.

2. Tap the microphone icon in the message bar.

3. Talk for at least two minutes. Include everything you'd normally cut: who's involved, what you've already tried, what you're worried about.

4. Send it as is, typos and all. Then scan your ramble for one thing only, a word that flipped your meaning.

Ten minutes start to finish, and you'll feel the difference.

Watch: two AIs disagreed in front of my live class, and the second one caught real mistakes.

@aiover50

#creatorsearchinsights Two AIs disagreed in front of my class Thursday and it made the whole point for me. Even a good answer has holes t... See more

Worth Knowing

The people deciding how AI gets used are mostly over 40

AARP took a hard look at who actually runs AI inside companies. Nearly half of employers say most or all of the decisions about how and where to use AI are made by employees 40 and older. Day to day usage skews younger, but the judgment calls sit with the experienced crowd. So much for the story where AI belongs to the youngest person in the room. Read more

LinkedIn added a button for posts that read like AI

Every LinkedIn post now carries a report option flagging it as AI slop. The platform is admitting what readers already noticed: the feed filled up with generated filler and people are tired of it. Your own stories, told in your own words just got more valuable. Read more

Microsoft's CEO says AI won't save a broken business

Satya Nadella warned that companies bolting AI onto broken processes can automate their way into failure faster. Adopting the tool without fixing the underlying system just makes the problems run at machine speed. I've been making this argument all year. Get the basics right first, then add AI. Read more

Meta wants to run a personal AI agent for you

On Meta's earnings call this week, Mark Zuckerberg laid out a push into personal AI agents that act on your behalf inside the apps you already use. Every big platform is racing toward the same thing. An agent is only as useful as what it knows about you. That's worth setting up on your own terms, before a platform decides what yours should know. Read more

Tell me

Have you ever talked to your AI instead of typing? Yes or no is plenty (I read every reply).