I spent most of 2024 testing why my AI assistant still felt like a fancy tool, and I was far beyond "expert" roles. The common advice improved the output, but the partnership was missing. It turns out they were treating the symptom, not the cause.
Is Your AI a Partner or Just a Tool?
You followed the advice. You told the AI to be a marketing expert or a senior UX designer, but the results still feel generic and lack the depth that comes from experience. Most role-prompting guidance leaves you with a more sophisticated autocomplete, not a true partner.
Designing roles with deep context, specific goals, and clear constraints will dramatically improve your AI's output. But even perfecting this approach still leaves you with a better tool, not a true partner. The real breakthrough requires a fundamentally different approach.
The Role Prompting Gap - Pt. 1
Stop Talking to AI, Start Structuring for It
We often approach prompting like a conversation, but an endless wall of text is the equivalent of noise for an AI. Shifting from unstructured text to structured input using formats like Markdown or JSON isn't just a technical tweak, it's a fundamental change in how we communicate with AI to achieve clarity, consistency, and more reliable results.
