You've tried ChatGPT or Claude. The results seem fine, if a little underwhelming. You wonder if people like me who extol AI's capabilities are the ones hallucinating, Axios' Jim VandeHei writes.

• You're not alone. You're simply prompt-shy.

📏 Why it matters: The gap between those getting 10x value from AI and those getting Google-level search results isn't brain power or tech skills. It's asking the right question in the right way with the right context.

• The good news: Anyone can prompt AI with greater sophistication and confidence to get greater results, starting the second you finish this column.
• It's worth it to pay $20 a month to access the newest models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. This is a tech that improves week-to-week and month-to-month. If you use the free tier, you miss out.

Let's use the writing of a column like this as an example:

📚 Context is king. AI isn't a mind reader — it's a context machine. The more you give it (your job, your industry, the stakes, the audience, the history), the sharper its output.

• The prompt: "I am the CEO of Axios writing to an audience of smart professionals with mixed AI feelings and experience. I want to write a Finish Line column in Smart Brevity style that provides specific, actionable ways to instantly improve someone's AI prompting skills. 500 words tops."

❓ Question yourself. One of the biggest mistakes users make is trying to think of everything themselves. AI is actually better at figuring out what it needs from you than you are. So ask it.

• The prompt: "Knowing the context and intent, pose five questions that will help sharpen the final column."

👨‍🏫 Show, don't tell. Specific examples beat broad instructions every time. The more you feed into AI, the better the answers it spits out.

• The prompt: "Here are five previous Finish Line columns. Commit to memory the style, voice and length for all future Finish Line prompts or columns."

🧐 Push harder. Don't accept the first answer. The first draft is the warm-up. "Make it sharper." "Cut it in half." "What's my weakest point?" This is where the magic happens.

• The prompt: "Good start, but too corporate. Rewrite it more conversationally and with more punch. Shorten the paragraphs by 50% and remove buzzwords."

🧠 Remember it. This is how you develop a superpower: Turn your one-time wins into a permanent template of you. AI knows what it did right — better than you do because it can see its own patterns. So ask it to tell you, then start building a library of your personal Super Prompts. (There are more advanced ways to do this, but that's for later.)

• The prompt: "This is exactly the output I want going forward. Reverse engineer it. Write me a reusable prompt — including the role, tone, structure, length, vocabulary and formatting rules — that would reliably produce work like this. Make it specific enough that I can paste it at the top of any future request and get the same quality."

Pro tip: If typing slows you down, talk it out. Use voice input to explain your thinking — you'll naturally give AI more context, faster.

The bottom line: Do these five things, and you'll instantly be in the top 10% of AI users overnight. Shoot me any specific success stories (or flaws!).

📬 Send Jim your prompting success stories (or failures): [email protected] ... Share this column.

• 📈 If you're a CEO or on a CEO's team: Ask to join Jim's new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.

It's wildflower season in Texas. Thanks to Axios Houston reporter Shafaq Patel for the field shot!

• 🦋 The Lone Star State makes it easy to game out your perfect shot with a map tracking four types of blooms: Prairie verbena, Texas paintbrush, Indian blanket and bluebonnets.

Send us the spring flora from your city to [email protected] ... Get Axios Local.