You don't need to learn "prompt engineering." You don't need a course. You need three small questions that, over about a week, become a habit. Once they are, you'll catch 80% of the mistakes AI makes — and get answers worth trusting on the rest.
Read these once. Come back to this page whenever you need the refresher.
Vague in, vague out. Most disappointment with AI is the user's fault, not the AI's. If you ask "tell me about leases" you'll get a Wikipedia article. If you ask "I'm renewing a lease, the landlord added three clauses I don't understand — walk me through what changed and flag anything I should push back on" — now it has a chance. Write to AI like it's a brilliant, slightly distracted intern who has never met you.
Before you hit send, ask yourself: how would I check this? What would a good answer look like? If the answer is "I'd know it when I see it" — fine, but be on guard. If the answer is "I could look it up, call someone, do the math" — great. Now you have a verification plan. If the answer is "I have no idea what 'right' would look like" — that is not the question you should be asking AI alone. Or at least, not without a human expert as the final check.
Four things AI fundamentally can't know: what happened after its training cutoff (it doesn't know today's news); anything not in its training data (your town's quirks, internal documents, rare topics); anything private about you (your health, your finances, your family, unless you told it in this conversation); and whether it's right (it has no compass for truth — it will be wrong the same way it's right, with full confidence). Before trusting an answer, say out loud: "what doesn't it know here?"
Because ten questions is a course. Three is a habit. The goal isn't to make you a prompt engineer. It's to give you something small enough to actually use — every time, forever, with any AI tool that gets invented next year or the year after.
A task you've been avoiding. A document you don't understand. A decision that's been stuck. Type it in, walk through the three questions, get back a prompt you can paste straight into ChatGPT.
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After a week with the three questions, these take you the rest of the way.
Pick one real thing before bed. A bill, an email, a document. Use the three questions. Verify one thing. That's the whole assignment.