🤖 You already have today's prompt

There is a prompt I have typed so many times that I no longer copy it from anywhere. For months it lived in a note on my desktop and I pasted it in every time. Then one morning last week I caught myself typing it out from memory, got a word wrong, fixed it, and carried on. I could not tell you which week I stopped opening that note.

By the end of this, you will:

The third time you do something is usually where it stops being an experiment and starts being a process you own.

Last Thursday I put a prompt in front of you. If you ran it, and ran it again on Saturday, today is the third time. If you have not run it at all yet, today is simply the first, and it works exactly the same way. Nothing about the prompt changes either way. The only thing that changes is how much of your attention it takes.

While we are here, something worth knowing about the company you are in. Pew Research asked Americans this year whether they use ChatGPT. Among people aged 50 to 64, thirty-seven percent said yes. Among those 65 and older, nineteen percent. Three years ago those same numbers were thirteen percent and four percent.

So no, you are not behind a crowd that left without you. Depending which side of sixty-five you sit on, it is somewhere between a fifth and a third of us – and both numbers have more than doubled in three years.

Here is today's step. Open ChatGPT and paste in the same prompt – the instruction you type into the box – that you used last week, with the next heading from your outline:

If you do not have an outline yet, you are not shut out of this. An outline is nothing more than a list of the headings a short guide would have – six or eight lines, the questions somebody would ask you about a thing you already know. Write those down and you have what the prompt needs.

Three things, the same three as last week:

There is one adjustment worth making. If what came back still does not sound like you, paste in a paragraph you wrote yourself and ask it to match that. That gives it more of your own material, which is what it works with best.

What is not worth doing is rewriting the prompt to be cleverer. A prompt you know beats a prompt you are still learning.

I want to be straight with you about what improves and what does not.

The writing that comes back will not be better because of anything you did. It is the same prompt. What is different is you – less time re-reading the instructions, quicker to spot the sentence that is not yours.

And here is the part that does not go away with practice: ChatGPT will still hand you a confident sentence that came from nowhere. That is how it works, not a fault you can train out of it. What changes is how fast you catch it. On the first run, catching one takes real effort. It gets easier to spot with practice, though I would not put a number on when.

If you skip today, nothing is lost. The outline keeps, and so does the prompt.

If you feel like it, reply with a number: how many sections you have now. Zero is a perfectly good answer, and it is the one I would have sent for most of my life.

Talk soon,
Bob

A short safety piece from my place on why that unsubscribe button can be as risky as any suspicious link – with the research behind it.

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