The question behind the question
"I know what I want. I just do not know how much to tell it."
That is the honest version of the problem, and it has two failure modes rather than one. Give too little and your AI assistant fills the gaps with plausible invention, because a confident guess is what it produces when it has nothing better. Give too much and your actual instruction gets buried under three pages of background, where it competes with everything else for attention.
There is a middle setting, and it is smaller than most people expect.
What earns its place
Four things pay their way in almost every request.
The goal. Not the topic. The goal. "Summarise the vendor contracts" is a topic. "Decide whether we can exit the contracts before June without penalty" is a goal, and it silently tells the assistant which clauses matter and which are noise.
The audience. Who reads the output, and what they already know. This does more work than any tone instruction. "For our finance director, who has not read the contracts" produces different output from "for the lawyer who drafted them."
Hard constraints. The things that make an answer unusable if broken. Length. Format. Words you never use. Claims you will not make without a source. Keep these short and absolute, because you will be restating them later.
One example of good. A single paragraph from a previous piece you were happy with beats several sentences of adjectives about tone. Show it once, and you have replaced a description with a specimen.
Test each sentence with one question: if I deleted this, could the answer change? If not, it is decoration. Decoration is not free, because it sits between your instruction and the answer.
What usually does not earn its place
Company history nobody asked about. The full methodology when you need one number from it. Your own reasoning about what the answer might be, which quietly steers the assistant towards agreeing with you. Politeness padding. Three near-identical examples where one would do.
The costly one is the pre-emptive document dump. Pasting an entire report so the assistant "has everything" sounds thorough, but you have just made your one line of instruction a very small part of a very large pile, and made it harder for anyone, silicon or otherwise, to work out what you actually want.
In plain English
- Context:
- Everything the assistant can see when answering: your instructions, the documents you pasted, and the conversation so far.
- Grounding material:
- The specific source text you want an answer built from, as opposed to background reading.
- Hard constraint:
- A rule that makes the output unusable if broken, such as a length limit or a no-recommendations rule.
- Signal to noise:
- How much of what you supplied is actually load bearing for the task at hand.
The same request, twice
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
[pastes the full 60 page supplier agreement, the previous agreement, and an internal strategy memo] Have a look at these and let me know your thoughts on the contract situation.
Output
These documents describe a long standing supplier relationship. The agreement covers pricing, delivery obligations, liability and termination. The strategy memo suggests the organisation is reviewing its supplier base. Overall the arrangement appears standard for the sector, though there are some areas worth reviewing further.
Three documents, no goal, no audience, no constraint. The assistant had everything and nothing, so it produced a tour of the material and an insight into none of it.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Goal: decide whether we can exit this supplier agreement before June without paying a penalty. Audience: our finance director, who has not read the contract. Source: use only the termination and pricing sections pasted below. Constraints: under 200 words, quote the clause number for every claim, and write UNCLEAR rather than guessing if the text does not settle it. [pastes the two relevant sections]
Output
Exit before June is possible but not free. Clause 11.2 allows termination on 90 days written notice, which means notice must be served by 1 March. Clause 11.4 applies an early termination charge equal to three months of the minimum volume commitment set in clause 6.1. Whether the annual rebate under clause 6.4 is clawed back on early exit is UNCLEAR from the text supplied.
Far less material, far more answer. The goal decided which sections mattered, the audience set the register, the clause requirement made it checkable, and the UNCLEAR instruction turned one guess into a flagged gap.
Notice what shrank and what grew. The pasted material dropped from three documents to two sections. The instructions went from one vague sentence to four labelled lines. That trade is the whole lesson.
A shape you can reuse
Goal: [the decision or output this needs to produce, not the topic]
Audience: [who reads it and what they already know]
Source: use only the material below. Do not add outside knowledge.
Constraints:
- [length or format]
- [anything that makes the answer unusable if broken]
- If the source does not settle something, write UNCLEAR rather than guess.
Material:
[paste only the sections that bear on the goal]
When you genuinely are not sure how much to include, do not guess. Make the assistant tell you.
Here is what I want: [one sentence goal].
Here is what I have given you: [one line describing the material].
Before you answer, list the questions you would need answered to do this
well, ordered by how much each one would change your output. List at most
five. Do not attempt the task yet.
Half the time the list confirms that ChatGPT, or whichever assistant you use, already has enough. The other half it names the one fact you forgot, which is cheaper to learn now than after you have read a thousand confident words built on a guess.
And when you have over-supplied and the thread already feels heavy, prune it.
From the material I pasted, list only the sections that actually bear on
this goal: [restate the goal].
For each one, give the section heading and a single line saying why it
matters. Then list which sections I can safely drop.
It feels generous to paste everything, as though you are being helpful. You are being helpful to a filing cabinet. What the assistant needs is not the whole cabinet, it is the folder and a reason to open it.
Checkpoint
Include the goal, the audience, hard constraints and one example of good. Leave out background nobody asked for. When unsure, ask the assistant what it is missing before it answers.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4What are the two opposite failure modes when deciding how much context to give?