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Five-line brief & improvement loop

From Lesson 11: a prompt is context that reshapes the answer — briefing quality drives output quality almost linearly. Fill in the five lines below before you ask, and use the loop on the back for anything worth a second pass.

The five-line brief

1. Objective — what you want, and for whom:

2. Context — what it cannot know without you: your situation, data, audience:

3. Constraints — length, tone, format, what to avoid:

4. Example — a sample of the shape or voice you want (patterns beat descriptions):

5. Uncertainty rule — how it should handle not knowing something ("say unknown rather than guess"):

The controlled improvement loop (one brief rarely finishes a job — endless re-prompting is the expensive way to learn that)

  1. Define the objective (line 1 above).
  2. Get an initial attempt.
  3. Evaluate it against explicit criteria — written before you look.
  4. Name the gaps, specifically.
  5. Request targeted improvement of those gaps only — never "make it better".
  6. Verify important claims independently. AI critique of AI output is a drafting aid, never verification.
  7. Keep what you learned — save this brief and your criteria for reuse.
  8. Stop when another round would add less than it costs. That's a decision, not a failure.

My stop rule for this task — good enough looks like:

Record (for a brief worth reusing)

Task: · Rounds run: · Saved as template?

education.yougenius.ai · The Prediction Machine · free to copy and adapt within your organisation.