Prompt
noun
What you type to the machine. Occasionally left at the top of a school exam by mistake, which is how the students found out.
Also known as AI instruction
- Chapter 3. The New Industrial Revolution
- Chapter 6. The Invisible Line
- Chapter 8. The Water Downstream
- Chapter 9. The Data You Hand Over
- Chapter 10. Mo Had Done the Math
- Chapter 11. The Freeze
- Chapter 15. Judgement
- Chapter 20. Empathy: Being Met
- Chapter 22. Timing: Judging ‘When’
- Chapter 27. The Trust Economy
A prompt is the instruction, question, example or lump of context you give an AI so it knows what you are asking for. It can be six words, six pages or a feverish paragraph written after the third failed attempt. Good prompts help: they clarify the task, audience, constraints and standard, and they are the difference between ‘write something about trust’ and a proper brief that says what trust means here, who is reading and which bits it must not invent. But prompting is not the grand human superpower some people have tried to sell. A magnificent prompt cannot decide whether the original problem is stupid, whether the source is trustworthy, whether the answer fits the moment, or who takes responsibility when it goes sideways. The prompt starts the exchange. Judgement frames it, checks it and decides what happens next. Also, delete the prompt before submitting the homework.
See also LLM Agentic AI Hallucination
References
- Human Still Wins (2026), Chapter 9 — The Data You Hand Over