I Stopped Writing Prompts and Started Writing Systems. The Results Weren't Even Close.

Everyone is still typing one question at a time into ChatGPT like it's a search engine with feelings. I was doing the same thing six months ago. Ask a question. Get an answer. Ask another question. Get a slightly worse answer. Paste the whole mess into a doc and pretend it was useful. Then I started looking at what the AI was actually doing under the hood. Not the answer it gave me. the process it used to get there. And I realized something that changed every project I've touched since. The prompt you type is not the most important prompt in the conversation.