Hey,
Last week, someone in the community shared a screenshot of a conversation they had been having with ChatGPT.
They had typed: "Help me grow my business using social media."
AI gave them ten bullet points. Post consistently. Use hashtags. Engage with your audience. Try Instagram Reels. Collaborate with influencers.
They read it. They found it vague. They tried again. "Give me a content strategy." Same thing. They tried a third time. "What should I post to get clients?"
Same energy. Same advice. The kind you could find in any random blog post from 2019.
They told me, "AI is just not that useful for marketing."
I told them: the AI was not wrong. It gave the most average possible answer to the most average possible question. That is what it does.
The problem was not the AI. The problem was that they had not thought yet.
The Difference Between a Prayer and a Prompt
When you pray, you hand your problem to something bigger and hope it figures it out.
There is nothing wrong with prayer. But AI is not the right place for it.
A prayer sounds like: "Help me get more clients."
A prompt sounds like: "I run a digital marketing agency that works with small retail shops in Pune. I want to write a WhatsApp message to 20 shop owners I met at a trade fair last Saturday. The message should feel personal, mention that we met briefly, and ask for a 15-minute call this week. Keep it under 100 words. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch."
The difference is not length. The difference is thinking. The second message has about three minutes of thinking behind it, written out in plain text. The first one has none.
When you hand AI a vague question, you get a vague answer. Not because the AI failed. Because it succeeded at answering exactly what you asked.
Why AI Cannot Think for You
AI does not know your business. It does not know your city, your customers, your prices, or what you have already tried. It does not know what makes your situation different from a thousand other situations that look similar on the surface.
What it knows is the average of everything written on the internet about your topic. That average is designed for nobody in particular. Which means it helps nobody in particular.
This is the part people miss. AI is incredibly good at executing. It is not designed to figure out what you should be doing. That part is your job.
If you skip your part and go straight to typing, AI will skip nothing. It will answer immediately. It will sound confident. It will give you something that looks like an answer. And it will be useless because it is the average answer to an unclear question, not your actual answer to your actual problem.
What You Have to Do Before You Open the Chat
Think first. That is it.
Three questions. Answer them in your head before you type anything.
What exactly do I want?
Not "help with marketing." Something specific. A WhatsApp message. Five post ideas for this week. A 150-word product description for a new service I am launching.
Who is it for?
Not "my customers." Which customers. Where they are. What they care about. What they are worried about.
What does good look like?
If AI gave you the perfect answer, what would it look like? What would make you actually use it today?
If you cannot answer all three in under a minute, you are not ready to prompt. You need to think first.
The moment you can answer all three, the prompt almost writes itself.
The Connection to What We Covered Before
In Issue 03, we talked about the 3-Part Prompt. State, Change, Keep. That framework works because it forces you to think before you type.
State is your thinking about what exists right now. Change is your thinking about exactly what you want. Keep your thinking about what must not change.
The structure does not replace the thinking. It organises it. You still have to bring the thinking.
Most bad prompts are not badly structured. They are just empty. There was no thinking to organise in the first place.
Fix the thinking first. The structure follows naturally.
One Quick Test
Before you send any prompt this week, pause for five seconds and ask yourself one question.
"Have I actually thought about this, or am I hoping AI will figure it out for me?"
If the honest answer is the second one, close the chat. Spend two minutes thinking. Then come back and write your prompt.
You will be surprised how much shorter and more useful your prompts become when you do your thinking before you type.
Your Action for This Week
Pull up the last prompt you typed that gave you a disappointing result. Not something the AI got wrong technically. Something that felt generic, off-target, or just not usable.
Ask yourself: had you actually thought before you typed?
Now answer the three questions. What exactly did you want? Who was it for? What would good have looked like?
Write a new prompt with those answers built in. Use it. See what comes back.
Reply and tell me the before and after. I read every reply.
If you want ready-made prompt templates you can actually think into and adapt for your own builds, the VibeShip Vault has a growing library. And if someone you know is getting useless answers from AI and blaming the tool, send them here to join the community free.
See you next week.
Prathamesh
Founder, VibeShip