A brief, not a spell.

You typed a question, got back something that reads like a brochure, and wondered what everyone else knows that you don’t. Then you found a list of secret phrases online, pasted one in, and got a longer brochure.

Here is what those lists leave out: there are no magic words. An AI assistant is a capable stranger. It has read a great deal about the world and, until you tell it, knows nothing about your Tuesday. It doesn’t know who you cook for, what your boss is like, or that you have forty-five minutes and one good pan. With nothing to go on, it writes for the average person, and nobody is the average person.

So a good prompt is a brief, the kind of note you would leave for a smart temp on their first morning. It says what you need, what the situation is, and what should be on your desk at the end.

The spells, tested

In 2025, researchers at Wharton published four Prompting Science Reports that tried the famous tricks on hard, graduate-level questions with right and wrong answers. Expert personas (“act as a world-class…”) made no significant difference to accuracy across six models, with one model as the exception. Offering a tip or making a threat generally had no significant effect on scores. Politeness helped on some questions and hurt on others, and it was hard to tell in advance which. And “think step by step” added little on models that already reason before they answer, while taking more time.

Those tests measured accuracy, so they can’t prove a trick never helps. They do show it is nothing to count on.

So be polite if you are a polite person. It is a fine way to live. It is not a technique.

Roles are not banned, only demoted. A role can change the voice and the angle of an answer. In those tests it did not make the answer more accurate. “Play the hiring manager and interview me” is a real task. “You are the world’s greatest hiring expert” is a costume.

Side by side

Look at the two prompts on this page. The weak version has a costume, a breathing exercise, an incantation and a bribe. What it lacks is a single fact: dinners for whom, for how many, with how much time. The assistant has to guess, so you get a week of recipes for a household that isn’t yours.

The strong version has no special phrases at all. It says who is eating, when the cook gets home, what the kitchen can handle and what should come back: a table and a shopping list. It ends by asking the assistant to own up to its guesses. You could hand the same note to a friend who cooks, and that is the test. If a person could work from it, an assistant can too.

The next five lessons take the brief apart one letter at a time: D, R, E, A, M. First comes the part every prompt needs, which is knowing where you want to end up.