Spent 2 weeks tweaking my prompts for a client project before I found the one weird trick

I was getting garbage outputs for a medical writing task, then I tried telling the AI to 'explain it like I'm a 5th grader' first and let it build up from there. Has anyone else found that starting with a simplified base changes the whole quality?

3 comments

3 Comments

lucasjackson1d ago

I've had the exact same experience with technical documentation actually. @hayes.joel mentioned it feeling like giving the AI a map to follow and that's the perfect way to put it. I think the simplified version acts like a constraint that keeps the AI from going off on tangents with all that made up jargon it loves to use. It's almost like the AI needs to prove it can handle the easy stuff before you trust it with the hard stuff. Once I started doing this I noticed way less of those weird hallucinations where it just invents facts to sound smart.

jessica_robinson236d ago

Wait does the "explain like I'm 5" trick actually force the AI to be more accurate with the facts before it gets fancy? I've noticed the same thing with technical stuff - if I ask for a simple version first, the final output has way less hallucinations and weird jargon. It's like you're giving the AI a solid foundation to build on instead of letting it jump straight to the complex stuff and mess it up.

hayes.joel6d ago

My third time testing this I asked for a simple breakdown of a coding problem first and the full answer was actually usable. It really does feel like you're giving the AI a map to follow instead of letting it guess where to go. That simple version trick has saved me hours of fixing weird made up examples.