Justin Jorgensen
The Debrief

The Debrief · Prompt

Reverse Prompting

Stop writing the request. Have the AI write it for you, then run it.

A glowing architectural blueprint and drafting tools on a table at night.

Type "write me something about X" and you get generic mush. The model is only matching your input. Vague in, vague out.

So I stopped writing the request and started asking the model to build it for me. I have it design the ideal prompt first, hand it a sample of how I actually write, then tell it to run its own brief.

You are an expert at writing [document type] for [your audience or role].
Match the voice in this sample: [paste a paragraph or a past piece you've written, more is better].
Before you respond, design the ideal prompt I should give you to produce [the deliverable] on [TOPIC] for [AUDIENCE].
Then run that prompt.

It works for two reasons. First, it forces your thin one-liner to expand into a real brief, with audience, stakes, and structure, before a word gets drafted. Second, the voice sample is the cheat code. The more of your own writing you paste in, the more it comes back sounding like you instead of a press release.

Feed it real context. Who's reading this, what's actually at stake, and a paragraph or two you've genuinely written. The brief it designs is a starting point you can edit before you run it, and the draft that comes back is still yours to shape.

Justin Jorgensen

Infrastructure and operations leader who builds with AI every day. I write about judgment, AI, and building things that last.