Your Master AI Prompt Doc Dies in a Month

Stop writing clever prompts. Keep a brief per workflow instead.

A thread I got into on Notes this week turned into something worth writing down properly. So here it is, cleaned up.

The starting point: using AI well is a management skill, not a technical one. If you can delegate to a junior — give context, say what "done" means, check the work before it goes upstream — you already know how to brief AI. The people who struggle usually skip all three. Vague ask, accept the first draft, forward it, move on.

The part I underplayed at first, and Matheus caught it, is the correction loop. You don't accept or discard the first output. You say what was off, and the second and third passes are where the real value shows up. "Good, but you missed the budget variance and the tone's too formal — again."

Here's the catch that turns this into actual work. With a junior, corrections compound. They remember. Tell someone once that finance always wants the risk section up top, and you never say it again. AI doesn't remember. Unless you carry the correction forward yourself, you're re-teaching the same junior every single morning.

So the skill isn't the clever prompt. It's capturing what you corrected and building it into the next brief.

The reusable brief

Pick one workflow you run often — status reports, requirements summaries, whatever. Write a short brief for it, four parts:

Context. What this is and who reads it. "Weekly status for a payments program. Audience is the steering committee — execs, not engineers."

Done looks like. "One page. Red/amber/green up top. Risks before progress. No jargon."

Standing corrections. The running "what I always have to fix" list. "Don't bury the ask. Cut the adjectives. Call out budget variance explicitly." This is the important one, and it starts empty.

The task. Paste this week's raw notes underneath.

The whole trick is the third section. Every time you correct the output, spend thirty seconds moving that fix into standing corrections. Next week you paste the brief first, and the draft comes back already eighty percent right. That's the compounding a real junior gives you for free — you're just doing the remembering on their behalf.

The catch

Keep it one brief per workflow. The moment you try to write a single master brief for "all my AI work," it bloats past the point you'll actually read it, and you're back to winging it. Small, boring, one-per-task docs survive. The grand unified prompt doc dies in a month.

This piece went out first to newsletter subscribers. Subscribe on Substack to get them as they publish.