Stop Writing Better AI Prompts. Build Better Context.

Truckloads of AI content focus on building better prompts.

But today I learned that context drives consistency and higher value from your AI.

This meme is used to respond to “vagueposting” on X, but it’s so applicable to the way we use AI.

Today’s Exercise

I built a Claude Project, a research assistant, to generate useful, interesting ideas for this newsletter. I uploaded:

• My newsletter guide (the one built for my editor project)

• Task instructions

Then I asked for three newsletter topics, in my voice, that would be useful to my readers.

The Output

My research assistant pumped out three decent angles, well explained, and audience-specific. Here’s one of them:

1. “The One AI Feature That Actually Saved Me Time This Week”

Why this works: Your readers don’t want a tutorial on Projects—they want to know if this stuff is worth their time. You’re past the basics but not deep enough to get technical. Perfect spot to say “here’s what clicked for me and why you might care.”

The angle: Pick the specific moment when Claude Projects actually did something useful for you. Maybe it remembered your newsletter voice without you re-explaining it. Maybe it pulled from past conversations to help with today’s work. Whatever the concrete win was.

Your readers will trust “here’s what worked for me on Day 5” way more than “here’s the complete guide to AI workspaces.”

No hype. No doomerism. Consideration for the reader.

That’s what context can do to shape the output you get from Projects.

The Value

Context set-up takes time upfront. The payoff comes later, when you come back to a task again and again without re-explaining everything re-engineering prompts because you’re frustrated with the output.

“Context is king” is a lame way to close this out. But yeah, it is king.

Lessons 1-5 Recap

I had Claude put together a review document and a simple quiz to capture learnings from lessons 1-5. You can check it out here.

Next: Lesson 6 — Image creation with Nano Banana