How to Use AI When Your Brain Is Oatmeal

You know sometimes I get a sort of apologetic grin when people get on the phone (or zoom or google meet). “Nate, I don’t use those fancy prompts, I know they’re good. I just don’t have time.”

Don’t worry lol your secret is safe with me. I sometimes use the short ones too. But even if you’re using short prompts there are still ways to prompt that work better than others. And yes you can remember them at 3AM (although this is my obligatory PSA to please try to avoid ChatGPT at 3AM).

Anyway, kidding aside I wrote this guide for when you’re sleep deprived or busy and so obviously I made it super scannable and easy to follow.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret now—the key is what almost no one writes about: how you get specific. Prompting is the art of getting specific and naming work. But most of the stuff in places like r/promptengineering still treats prompts as fancy magic words. And the stuff that admits that it’s more complex than that still won’t tell you how to get specific. Especially if your brain is tired.

And that’s what we do here. Give you some specific techniques (the irony) on how to get specific enough to be useful when you’re tired, and also some places where you want to still put the time in and write a longer and more thoughtful prompt. Those guardrails are just as important as the individual prompts.

Just for fun, there’s more than 11 quick prompts here that all fit this same get-specific framework. At the end I link out to some of my other fave prompting articles I’ve written as well, so you get the complete package. Have fun!