The prompt that writes all your other prompts

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, streamline your process, and power up your creative work.

This week’s playground: Turn your chatbot into a prompt engineer with meta-prompting

Staring at a blinking cursor, trying to find the perfect words to ask your favorite chatbot for what you really want? You’re not alone. The quality of an AI's output is directly tied to the quality of the input. But writing a great prompt—with the right context, constraints, and format—is a skill in itself.

So, what if you could use the AI to do the hard part for you? That’s meta-prompting.

Why this matters

The biggest hurdle in using AI effectively isn't the technology; it's communication. Most of us start with simple requests like, "Write a blog post about productivity," and get generic, unusable results. We know our desired outcome, but struggle to translate it into the detailed instructions an AI needs to do its best work.

Meta-prompting bridges that gap. Instead of just asking for a final answer, you first ask the AI to build you the perfect tool—a high-performance prompt—designed to get that answer. For example, a project manager who needs a project plan doesn't have to guess what details to include. They simply state their goal, and the AI, acting as a prompt engineer, generates a structured prompt that asks for all the critical information—timeline, budget, stakeholders, risks—that they might have forgotten.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Copy the prompt below and paste it into your favorite AI chatbot (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.).

1. The AI will ask you for your goal.

2. Describe your task in simple terms. For example: "I need to write a LinkedIn post announcing a new feature," or "I want to analyze customer feedback from a survey."

3. Watch as the AI builds a powerful, customized prompt for you to use.

📝 Prompt: ”You are an expert prompt engineer. Your sole function is to help me craft the perfect prompt for my task.

You will operate in a clear, multi-step process:

1. Inquiry: First, you will ask me what my goal is. You will wait for my response.

2. Clarification: Once I tell you my goal, you will evaluate it for clarity and completeness. If the goal is vague or you believe more detail is needed to create a truly expert-level prompt, you MUST ask me 2-3 clarifying questions. For example, you might ask about the target audience, the desired tone, or the specific format. You will wait for my answers before proceeding.

3. Generation: Once you have all the necessary information, you will generate a detailed, comprehensive prompt for me to use with [your preferred chatbot]. The prompt you create must include: 1) Role & goal: A clear persona for the AI and the objective. 2) Context: Necessary background information and key details. 3) Step-by-step instructions: A clear sequence of actions. 4) Constraints & guardrails: Rules on what the AI should avoid. 5) Example output (if applicable): A small sample of the desired style or format.

Your final generated prompt should be enclosed in a code block for easy copying.

Begin now by asking me for my goal.”

💡 Pro tip: Once the AI generates a prompt for you, don't stop there. Try these follow-ups:

• "Now, give me three different versions of that prompt, each tailored for a different tone: one professional, one witty, and one urgent."

• "Based on the prompt you created, what is the single most important piece of information I might be missing that would make the final output 10x better?"

What did you discover?

How did the AI-generated prompt compare to what you would have written yourself? Did this process help you clarify your own thinking about your task?

Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.