That is my cat, Anubis. It is also, weirdly, how a room reacts to AI. Nobody is neutral. Then they actually spend five minutes with it.
You make the call. Ghoul, or adorable?
👆 Cast your vote. It changes nothing. Do it anyway.
People meet Anubis and split down the middle. Half want to swaddle him like a newborn. Half back slowly toward the door. Almost nobody just shrugs. AI does the exact same thing to a room, the gremlin camp and the genius camp staring at each other, both a little bit right.
The move is the same in both cases. Stop reacting. Get closer. Learn how to actually work with the strange little thing in front of you. So I turned how I really use these tools into six steps. They spell my cat.
Not a prompt trick. Not a magic word you whisper to the robot at midnight. Just six things I actually do so it stops handing me nonsense with a completely straight face. Here is each one, with teeth (and cat).
Say what you actually want. Not the task. The outcome.
Most people type the task. Write a status update. Try the outcome instead: make my VP believe I have this handled, and get their eyes on the one risk I am worried about. Same six seconds of effort, completely different result. The goal reshapes everything after it. Aim at the task and you get a task. Aim at the outcome and you get help.
Give it the seat you are sitting in.
The same facts land three different ways depending on who is talking to whom. A director briefing a VP. A PM nudging an eng lead. A founder emailing a customer who is about to churn. Tell the model which chair you are in and who is across the table. It cannot read the room until you hand it the room.
Vague in, vague out. Every single time.
This is where most people cheap out. They ask for something great and hand over nothing to make it great. Give it the data, the real constraint you cannot break, the doc, one example of what "right" looks like. That is the raw material. Skip it and you get mush, confidently delivered. Hand it nothing and, well. See below.
Treat the first draft like a scene partner, not a vending machine.
The first output is never the answer. It is the opening line of an improv scene. Build on it. Yes, and cut it in half. Yes, and sound less like a robot. Yes, and tell me what I am missing. People who are good at this are just good at the second, third, and fourth message. The magic was never the perfect prompt. It is the volley.
Tell it the shape. Do not make it guess, then get mad.
Bullets or paragraphs. Two hundred words or two pages. A table with these three columns. A Slack message I can paste without editing. If you do not name the format, it picks one, and it is allowed to pick wrong. Naming the shape up front is the cheapest quality upgrade you will ever make.
Read it like you did not write it.
This is the whole ballgame. Check the numbers. Check the claims. Assume it is confident and occasionally, cheerfully wrong, because it is. This single move is the line between people who are curious about AI and people who are actually good with it. The tool hands you a draft. You are still the one who signs it.
Screenshot this part. Pin it above your desk. Pretend you came up with it.
None of this is about better prompts. It is about treating the thing like a capable, slightly feral collaborator. Aim it, brief it, feed it, push it, shape it, and check its work. Same as you would with anyone good on your team. Anubis, for the record, contributed nothing but vibes.
Made by Phil Morehead. Modeled by Anubis, who slept through most of it.
philmorehead.com