The same task can hand you garbage or gold. The difference is two small moves: give it
a little context, then steer it.
Don't take my word for it. You're going to make the calls below and watch it happen.
Type a question, skim the answer, move on, and it feels like a party trick. Hand it a real job and steer it, and it does your work. Same tool, completely different outcome. Two moves make the difference, and you're about to run both. Here's your job for the next two minutes.
You run a small landscaping crew. This just landed in your inbox:
Hi, I'll be honest, I'm pretty disappointed. Your crew showed up almost two hours late on Thursday and left grass clippings all over my patio and driveway. For what I paid, I expected better. Not sure I'll be booking the fall cleanup.
You want to keep her. You'll send the crew back to redo the cleanup for free, but you're not refunding. Time to reply. You could stew on it for twenty minutes, or hand it to Claude. Let's hand it over, and you make the calls.
Three ways to ask. Tap each one and see what comes back.
Say you sent option B. You've got a real draft now, but it's stiff, a little long, and doesn't quite sound like you. This is the exact moment most people stop and just send it. Don't. Tap each option and watch what one more line does.
That's the whole thing. You never wrote a clever prompt. You gave it a little context, let it take a swing, then told it what was off in plain English, the same way you'd correct a new hire who brought you the wrong thing. Draft one being imperfect isn't a failure. It's the starting point.
That's the whole loop, and it works on nearly anything you'd give a capable assistant: an email, a quote, a job post, a week of social posts.
Give it the real job and the actual materials. Paste the whole email, the messy notes, the rough numbers. Don't tidy up first.
It comes back with a draft. Expect close, not perfect. A draft you can react to beats a blank page every time.
Say what's off, in plain words. "Shorter." "Warmer." "Drop that part." "Sound more like me." Go again till it's yours.
You already know how to do this. It's how you'd break in any new person. You're just typing instead of talking, and this one never gets tired of another round.
The plain-English lines that fix almost any draft — “shorter,” “sound more like me,” “give me three options,” and a dozen more. Copy, keep, reuse.