The People Winning With AI Give Commands, Not Requests
I genuinely think most people are using AI wrong. Not because theyāre bad at prompting. But because they st ill talk to AI like theyāre emailing a coworker. Now suggest me something, a strong hook or strong title of this entire post for the school community. Make sure it is ultra realistic, very very very very strong, very controversial, and click-worthy. āCan you help me with this?ā āHereās some contextā¦ā āMaybe improve this a little?ā I used to do the same thing. Then I started testing something really small: starting every prompt with a command instead of a request. And weirdly⦠the outputs became dramatically better. Cleaner. Sharper. Less generic. Less āAI sounding.ā I tested around 30ā35 of these command-style prompts while working on scripts, strategy docs, content ideas, summaries, research, all of it. The biggest thing I noticed wasnāt even speed. It was clarity. The AI stopped guessing what I wanted. For example: Instead of writing: āCan you summarize this for me in a simple way?ā I started writing: `/EXEC SUMMARY` Instead of: āCan you make this actionable?ā I wrote: `/CHECKLIST` Instead of: āThink deeper about this and tell me what could go wrongā¦ā I wrote: `/PITFALLS` That one small shift changes the entire response. Because now the model knows the job before it reads the task. Thatās the important part most people miss. The shortcut sets the mode. The prompt gives the material. And honestly, once you notice this, long polite prompts start feeling inefficient. Almost like opening 6 tabs to do something that needed one keyboard shortcut. Some of the ones I now use constantly: ⢠`/FIRST PRINCIPLES` ā break it down fundamentally ⢠`/NO AUTOPILOT` ā remove generic filler ⢠`/STEP-BY-STEP` ā make it executable ⢠`/AUDIENCE: BEGINNER` ā simplify properly ⢠`/BIAS CHECK` ā challenge assumptions ⢠`/TLDL` ā compress aggressively The crazy part is⦠this doesnāt just improve AI output. It changes how you think. You stop āasking AI for help.ā