AI & Work
You’re Not Bad at Prompting. You’re Prompting with Unexamined Assumptions.
The assumptions you bring to a prompt matter more than the prompt itself. This paper argues that the gap between what AI tools can do and what most people get from them is not a capability gap or a formatting gap. It is a diagnostic gap, built from unexamined assumptions about audience, purpose, and what “good” actually means. It draws on research in human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, and decision science to make the case that the prompt engineering industry has, almost entirely, been selling solutions to the wrong problem. Seven sections. One uncomfortable question: what are y…