Nate's Secret Sauce: A Prompt Engineering Masterclass using 19 Prompts To Write a 47-Page Report on the History of AI

A Complete Guide to how I use ChatGPT-4o, o3-mini-high, o1-Pro, and Deep Research to Craft Prompts That Unlock Incredible Deep Dive Reports—Prompts and 47 Page Report Included!

People have been asking me for my AI prompting secret sauce for a long time, and I’ve been trying to find a way to get it out there that shares the full story of the prompt—because I am not a guy who only prompts once. Yes, good one prompt (zero shot) prompts exist, but most work takes time and focus across multiple models. And you know what? I can’t find a complete guide that really shows how that works in real life, with real examples, and a real output.

So I made one! We’re going to work across four models here. You’ll get tons of screenshots to see the entire evolution of the conversation. I’ll offer commentary on the way, and you’ll get access to docs with my actual prompts at each stage plus the final 47 page report I created, which honestly is really cool by itself. It’s on the overall history of AI and how our public narrative about AI is shifting after ChatGPT!

Can I be honest for a minute?

At this point, I’m not interested in clever prompt tricks or novelty tricks like “act as the most amazing marketer ever” that claim to produce amazing results but don’t really move the needle repeatably. I care about what actually works—especially when the goal is real research, not just plausible summaries. This post is a breakdown of how I built, tested, and rebuilt a single deep research prompt nineteen times, across four model variants, until it produced a 47-page report on the history of artificial intelligence and how our narrative of AI has changed since the introduction of ChatGPT.

The outcome wasn’t luck. It was structure, friction, and iteration. It took hours of pushing models to break, noticing where they failed, and refining the prompt until it could withstand real intellectual pressure. This is what prompt engineering looks like when it’s not posturing. And no, it wasn’t literal hours of doing nothing else!

Prompt engineering is like simmering sauce. You add something, you stir it. You let it simmer a bit more. You sniff it. You add a bit of sarcasm or demand more salty structure in the prompt you’re building—and in the end it’s like the oatmeal in the fairy tale of the Three Bears and Goldilocks: it’s just right. And that’s when you get incredible results.

So strap in: I’m showing the full arc—failures, revisions, pivots, and fights. Not because it was efficient. But because this is what it takes when you want depth. I’m going to show prompts along the way in Google Docs. I’m going to show screenshots. I’m going to show the final output too. Have fun, and I hope you get a sense of how powerful prompting can be if you treat it like a discipline!