You have Claude or ChatGPT open. Now what.
Most people who try these tools and come away unimpressed made the same few mistakes. None of them are technical. This page is the short version of what to do differently.
It assumes you are competent at your job and new to this. Fifteen minutes.
Stop typing questions. Start pasting material.
Section titled “Stop typing questions. Start pasting material.”The single biggest mistake is using it like a search engine — a one-line question, a generic answer, disappointment.
These tools are good at reshaping material you give them and unreliable at recalling facts you didn’t. So give them the material. Paste in the whole email thread, the actual contract, the messy meeting notes, the three job descriptions you’re comparing. A half-page of your real context is worth more than an hour of clever phrasing.
Bad: “Write a follow-up email to a client who hasn’t responded.”
Better: paste the last three emails, then “Draft a follow-up. He went quiet after the pricing question. I don’t want to sound desperate and I don’t want to discount.”
The second one works because it knows what happened and what you’re worried about.
Say who it’s for and what good looks like
Section titled “Say who it’s for and what good looks like”It will produce something competent and generic unless you tell it otherwise. Two sentences fix that: who is going to read this, and what would make it good.
“This is for a facilities director who has been doing the job for twenty years and hates being sold to. Good means short, no adjectives, and it makes one specific claim he can check.”
That’s not prompt engineering. That’s the brief you’d give a new hire.
Ask for a draft, then argue with it
Section titled “Ask for a draft, then argue with it”Do not expect the first output to be right. Expect it to be a reasonable draft you now push back on — the same way you’d handle work from a capable junior.
“Too long, cut it in half.” “The second paragraph is generic, make it specific or delete it.” “You’ve made it sound like we’re apologizing. We’re not.”
Three rounds of that beats any single perfect instruction, and it’s faster than writing it yourself. People who get the most out of these tools are not writing better prompts. They’re having longer conversations.
Assume it is confidently wrong about facts
Section titled “Assume it is confidently wrong about facts”It will state things in a steady, professional voice that are simply untrue. Not often enough that you stop trusting it, which is precisely the problem.
Check anything that matters and anything specific: names, numbers, dates, citations, legal or tax claims, quotes attributed to real people, and any statistic it volunteers. If it produced a number you didn’t give it, treat that number as fiction until you’ve confirmed it.
Reshaping what you gave it is reliable. Recalling what you didn’t is not.
What it is actually good at
Section titled “What it is actually good at”For most people in an office job, the wins are unglamorous and worth real hours:
- Turning a mess of notes into a structured document
- Reading something long and telling you the three things you need to know
- Writing the awkward email — the chase, the pushback, the bad news
- Being a first critic: “what’s the weakest part of this argument?”
- Rewriting the same content for a different audience
- Getting you from blank page to bad draft, which is most of the difficulty
Notice these are all you have the material and the judgement, it does the typing. That’s the shape of the work that pays off today.
Be deliberate about what you paste
Section titled “Be deliberate about what you paste”Whatever you paste goes to the vendor. Depending on the plan you’re on, it may also be retained or used to improve their models — business and enterprise plans generally treat this differently from free and personal ones.
Read your plan’s actual terms once. Then set yourself a rule you can follow without thinking: for most people, don’t paste anything you wouldn’t be comfortable forwarding outside the company is about right. Client confidential material, personal data about employees or customers, and anything under an NDA deserve a deliberate decision rather than a habit.
Which one should you use?
Section titled “Which one should you use?”The one your company already pays for.
At this stage the differences between the major assistants matter far less than getting fluent with one of them. Pick it, use it on something real this week, and revisit the comparison in six months when you have an actual opinion.
If nobody has picked one for you, any of the main paid tiers is a defensible choice. The free tiers are fine for trying it and frustrating for working.
Then go learn it properly
Section titled “Then go learn it properly”The companies that build these tools publish good free training, and it is better and more current than anything we would write.
If you only do one, take the course for whichever assistant you settled on — the page says which one to start with for each. An hour of structured practice beats a month of poking at it.