The Prompt Engineering Advice Everyone Gives Is Backwards
How to Use AI Context Windows for Better Business Results
You’re sitting there crafting the perfect prompt. Adding constraints. Listing edge cases. Specifying tone, format, length, structure, exceptions to exceptions.
Twenty minutes later, you’ve written a 500-word prompt engineering masterpiece. You hit send.
The AI gives you generic nonsense.
So you add more instructions. More examples. More “do this, not that” guidance.
The output gets worse.
Here’s what actually happened: you over-engineered the prompt and under-supplied the context.
Most people approach AI backwards. They obsess over prompt structure whilst starving the AI of the actual information it needs to help them.
The reality: AI doesn’t need elaborate instructions nearly as much as it needs relevant context.
The Context Window Hack
Your AI tool has a context window, the amount of information it can “see” and work with in a single conversation. For most business AI tools, that’s between 128,000 to 200,000+ tokens (roughly 100,000 to 150,000+ words).
That’s massive. That’s 200+ pages of a book. That’s your entire project brief, customer interviews, market research, competitive analysis, and historical decisions all at once.
Most teams use about 0.1% of this capacity. They write a three-sentence prompt and expect the AI to magically understand their specific business context, team dynamics, customer needs, and strategic constraints.
Then they wonder why the output feels generic.
The hack isn’t better prompts. It’s better context.
Stop spending 20 minutes engineering the perfect instructions. Start spending 5 minutes loading the relevant context, then use simple prompts that reference that context.
Instead of: “Write a product requirements document for a mobile app feature following agile methodology with user stories in the format As a [user], I want [goal] so that [benefit], including acceptance criteria, technical considerations, and edge cases, keeping in mind we’re a B2B SaaS company with enterprise clients who care about security and our engineering team prefers React Native and our design system uses Material Design and...”
Try this: [Paste your actual customer feedback, existing PRD template, tech stack documentation, and design guidelines into the conversation]
Then prompt: “Based on the context provided, create a PRD for the mobile notification feature we discussed in the customer interviews.”
The second approach takes less time to write and produces dramatically better output because the AI actually understands your specific situation.
Why This Works (The Psychology)
AI models are trained on patterns. When you over-engineer prompts with elaborate instructions, you’re essentially fighting the model’s pattern recognition.
When you provide rich context, you’re letting the model see the actual patterns in your specific situation, then apply its capabilities to your reality rather than some generic template.
Think about how you’d brief a new team member on a project. You don’t give them a 500-word instruction manual on “how to think about projects.”
You show them:
The project background
Previous similar work
Customer feedback
Team discussions
Constraints and goals
Then you ask them a specific question.
That’s exactly how AI works best. Context first, simple question second.
The Shift You Need to Make
From: “I need to write the perfect prompt with all the right instructions” To: “I need to give AI the same context I’d give a smart colleague”
From: “More detailed prompts = better output” To: “More relevant context = better output”
From: “AI needs to be told exactly what to do” To: “AI needs to understand the situation, then it knows what to do”
Quick Start Prompt: Context Window Audit
Most people have no idea what context they should be providing to AI. This prompt helps you identify the relevant context for any business decision or task.
Quick Start Context Window Audit
I'm about to use AI for [specific task or decision]. Help me identify what context I should provide rather than relying on elaborate instructions.
My Task: [Describe what you're trying to accomplish]
Current Approach: [How you're currently prompting AI for this task]
Please help me:
1. CONTEXT GAPS: What information about my specific situation is missing that would help AI understand my needs?
2. OVER-ENGINEERING: What parts of my current prompt are elaborate instructions that could be replaced with simple context?
3. ESSENTIAL CONTEXT: What are the 3-5 most important pieces of context I should provide for this task?
4. SIMPLE PROMPT: Once I provide that context, what's the simplest prompt that would get me the result I need?How to Use This:
Copy your current elaborate prompt into the “Current Approach” section
Get AI’s analysis of what context you’re missing
Gather that context (documents, data, examples)
Replace your complex prompt with the simpler version plus rich context
What You’ll Discover: Most of your prompt engineering is compensation for missing context. Once you provide the right context, your prompts can be remarkably simple.