Why "Good Context" Is Becoming a More Important AI Skill Than "Good Prompting"
For a while, the common assumption about AI was straightforward: write a longer, more detailed prompt, and you'll get a better answer. It's an intuitive idea — more instruction should mean more precision. But watching how experienced AI users actually work reveals something different. They're not writing longer prompts. They're doing something smaller, and more deliberate: explaining their situation before ever stating the task. A Small Change With a Large Effect Consider two requests for the same output. The first: "Write me a Facebook post." The second: "I'm learning about AI and sharing that learning in simple language with a beginner audience. The post should be informative, relatable, and practical." The word count difference is small. The functional difference is not. The first request gives AI a task with no situation attached — it has to guess the tone, the audience, the purpose. The second gives AI a situation, and the task becomes alm...