Prompting Isn’t Commanding: How to Think With AI, Not Just Use It

About this video

John's approach to prompting ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or Gemini: give the model upfront context about the situation rather than telling it the outcome you want, so it can look at the problem in ways you might miss. He then checks its analysis against his own to make sure the numbers line up.

Transcript

Read the full transcript of “Prompting Isn’t Commanding: How to Think With AI, Not Just Use It”

Source: YouTube auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned (repeated caption lines removed, misheard brand names corrected).

0:03Let's talk about ChatGPT for a minute. Oh man, we need to be really focused on this part, right? Or let's talk about cloud or cursor. The most important part of all that you are doing when using ChatGPT or cursor or claude or gemini or whatever other tool deepseek that you want to use. The most important thing is your ability to ask a question and prep before that question. The things that I always do one if I'm using cursor or if I'm using ChatGPT or if I'm using claude I provide upfront context. So I talk about the general situation and I I I never at this point. So if I could do it 100 times, zero out of 100 times do I tell it what I want the outcome to be after I give it context. The second thing that I do is I create guard rails.

My guard rails are here you go. Do not change any existing code. And this is if I'm coding. Do not change anything that is working. Do not break anything that is working. Do not remove any lines of code and keep everything that is working. I do it every single time. You don't need to be over complicated and do a whole bunch. Now that's if I'm coding. If I am looking for something, I after I give it a bunch of context and I do this where I'm coding or if I'm looking for something, I give it all the information and then I say, I would like for you to tell me what you see. That's it. I give it context on what it's looking at. So, pictures, images, PDFs, CSVs. I give it industry information. I give it website information. I hit control select all. I

grab the entire website. I go to inspect and I grab all the code. I grab all of it and I I throw it in as a project. I put it in a folder and I save it. And then I wanted to tell me what it sees and then do an analysis. And then I want you to look at it the way a human would not look at it, the way I might miss something. And then I look at it and then I compare it to what I have because of course I'm going to do my own analysis just to make sure the numbers and everything lines up and I'm like, "Okay." And then I start to work through it. So here we go. Tips. Give it guard rails.

Give it context. Allow the tools to work for you. Stop telling them what to do. And you don't have to over complicate it. It really is that simple. And that is for Claude Open AI. So if you're using the back end, if you're using the front end, Chad GPT, DeepSeek or Gemini. Now the tools that you should use, use Vertex AI. Don't use Cling like it's just you're just going to get animation and you can use ChatGPT, but you need to prepare a prompt for ChatGPT to get a good image. VO don't use the front end because it's just V2, which then goes into Gemini. Go to Vertex AI. Use cloud for all of your coding. Anybody that says Chad GBT is is your coding tool is full of it. If anybody says this, Gemini, you're absolutely full of it.

3:40Now, Claude is great for coding. Claude is great for doing examples and building demos of websites and projects and tools. I mean, you could say build ahs and it will build it for you. Of course, you got to give it context and do all those things. Chad GBT is great for storytelling, for writing articles, for doing white papers and things of the sort. Gemini, to be truthful, the Google product, I really use Verdict AI or a V3 and it's all on the back end. So, I go into the cloud. I pay per prompt. It's worth it. For $50, I can get exactly what I need in a video. And it's much cheaper than going out and hiring a creative. But again, that's it. Guard rails. Give it context. Don't tell it what you want, unless of course it's creative. And that's it. All right.

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