Dispatches
field notes from the frontier — the full archive
GUIDESHow to Write Better Prompts for Better Answers From Your Favorite AI ToolThe quality of AI responses directly reflects the quality of your prompts—vague requests produce generic templates, while specific details about your situation, constraints, and desired output format generate genuinely useful answers. Rather than blaming the AI tool for bland results, invest twenty seconds typing out your actual context, the specific facts that matter, and what shape you want the response to take.
GUIDESHow to Make AI Respond Better by Telling It What Not to DoAI tools default to bland, predictable patterns from their training data, but you can get dramatically better results by identifying and explicitly banning the specific tics you dislike rather than asking for vague improvements like "make it warmer." Telling AI what NOT to do forces it away from common patterns and toward more specific, human-sounding output.