PLAYBOOK
Every piece of prompting advice starts from the same assumption, that you can describe the outcome you are after, so be specific, give examples, say what good looks like. That is sound advice, and it is no use at all on the days when the outcome is the thing you do not have. The proposal that feels wrong in a way you cannot name, the pricing page you would only recognise as right once it existed, the plan whose shape you will know on sight but cannot write down in advance. Those are the hardest prompts to write, and they sit under most of the work worth handing to these tools in the first place.
📍 In brief
When you cannot state the outcome, the prompt's job is not to specify the answer. Its job is to open a search that your judgement can close. You do not need to know what you want. You need to recognise it when it appears, and a method that makes it appear sooner. Five stages follow, drawn from the published research and from the firm's own build, fumbling included.