A beautifully written prompt cannot rescue an unclear objective. Before you ask AI to produce something, take a moment to explain what the work is for.
Start with the decision.
What will someone do with the output? A document that helps a founder choose a supplier needs different information from a document introducing that supplier to a customer. Same topic. Different job.
Give it the context you would give a colleague.
Explain the audience, the problem and the constraints. Supply the source material it should use. Identify what is known, what is uncertain and what it must not invent. Ask it to flag missing information rather than quietly fill the gaps.
Describe what good looks like.
“Write a marketing plan” is a request for an enormous range of possible answers. “Suggest three realistic ways a two-person business could reach local customers with this budget” gives the work a useful boundary.
Build review into the brief.
Ask for assumptions to be stated and claims needing verification to be identified. Then check them yourself. A request for sources is not a guarantee those sources exist or support the answer.
The useful skill is often the one you already have: thinking clearly about the work before asking someone—or something—to do it.