Free courses / Prompt Engineering Basics / Lesson 2
Context changes everything
One extra sentence about your situation is worth ten clever words.
Run the same task twice: once bare, once with two sentences of context about who you are and what you will do with the answer. Compare. The second is nearly always more useful, because the model stops guessing at the reader.
Context is not the same as private information. “A nurse writing a shift handover” is context. The patient's name is not, and is not needed.
Notice which piece of context did the work. That is what to include next time; the rest is noise.
- Bare versus with context; compare.
- Context is not private information.
- Keep the piece that did the work.
DOT / THE TRANSLATOR
One honest sentence about your actual situation outperforms any amount of "act as a world-class expert". I have never once become a world-class expert on request.
Try it
Run the two-version experiment on something from your week, then write down the one sentence of context that changed the answer most. Keep that sentence.
Do this task twice: once with no background from me, and once after asking me three questions. Show both results and tell me what the questions actually changed.
Then paste it into whichever assistant you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Not sure which? Meet them all.
Progress is saved on this device.
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