Lesson 79 · 2 min
Five prompt traps to avoid
Most disappointing answers come from a few common traps, and each one is easy to fix once you can name it.
Trap one: the leading question. "Why is my plan great?" gets praise. Ask "What are the weak points of this plan?" instead. Chatbots tend to agree with the way you frame things.
Trap two: asking for facts it cannot know, like today's prices or your company's internal rules, without giving them. Trap three: cramming five unrelated jobs into one message, so each gets a thin answer.
Trap four: trusting the tone. A confident, well-formatted answer can still be wrong. Trap five: pasting what you should not, like customer data, passwords or a colleague's private message.
When an answer feels off, run through the five. Usually one of them explains it, and a single changed sentence fixes it.
Do it now
Fix a leading question
- 1. Write down an idea you are excited about: a plan, a purchase, a post.
- 2. Ask for its weak points using the prompt below.
- 3. Decide which one point you will act on.
Here is my idea: [DESCRIBE IT]. Do not tell me what is good about it. List the 5 biggest risks or weak points, from most to least serious, and for each one suggest a small test I could do this week.
Quick check
Keep going
Next →Follow up instead of starting overWords from this lesson
- Sycophancy
- An AI's tendency to agree with you or flatter your ideas instead of telling you where you are wrong.
- Automation bias
- Our habit of trusting a machine's answer too readily, even when our own judgement or other evidence says otherwise.
- Data privacy
- Keeping personal or confidential information under control, including deciding what you type into AI tools and where it is stored.