Four reasons an answer is bad

Name the failure before you fix it

The instinct on receiving a poor answer is to rewrite the prompt and try again. That works often enough to be a habit and slowly enough to be a waste, because most of the rewriting addresses the wrong thing.

There are four causes. They need four different responses, and telling them apart takes about ten seconds once you know what to look for.

1. It did not have what it needed

Symptom: the answer is generic, hedged, or true of a category rather than your case. Phrases like “depending on your situation” and “you may want to consider”. It answers a question adjacent to yours.

Test: could a competent stranger have produced a better answer from this text alone? If not, the material was missing.

Fix: paste the thing. The document, the error, the data, the constraint that makes it hard. Do not rewrite the instruction; it was probably fine.

This is by a wide margin the most common cause, and the one people least often diagnose, because a generic answer reads like a lack of effort rather than a lack of information.

2. It did not understand what you wanted

Symptom: a good answer to a different question. A summary when you wanted an assessment. Advice when you wanted options. It went one level up or down from where you were aiming.

Test: read your instruction as a stranger. Is there a second reasonable reading? There usually is, and the model took it.

Fix: name the verb, the object and the finished state. “Review this” becomes “find every clause that lets them cancel without paying, quote each one, and say in one sentence what it means for me.”

3. The output is in an unusable form

Symptom: the content is right and you have work to do before you can use it. Nine paragraphs where you wanted a table. A table where you wanted a message you could send. Padding around the useful part.

Test: would you accept this if it were laid out differently?

Fix: the format lesson. Say the container, say what to omit, say what to do about gaps. Nothing about the substance needs to change.

4. It cannot do this

Symptom: the answer is confidently wrong in a way that does not improve when you supply more context or clearer instructions. Arithmetic that stays wrong. Claims about recent events. Precise citations. Counting things inside words. Knowledge of your private systems.

Test: you have made two genuine improvements and the same class of error survives both.

Fix: change the approach, not the prompt. Give it a calculator, a search tool, the document itself. Or do that part yourself.

The distinguishing mark of cause four is that better prompting produces a better-looking wrong answer. If your third attempt is more polished and equally wrong, stop rewriting.

A worked diagnosis

”I asked it to check my contract and it gave me a list of general things to look for in contracts.”

Cause one. The contract was described, not pasted.

”I pasted the contract and it summarised it. I wanted the risks.”

Cause two. “Check” has several readings; it took the most common.

”I asked for the risks and got six paragraphs. I wanted something I could take to my lawyer.”

Cause three. Content right, form wrong. Ask for a numbered list of questions with the clause quoted beside each.

”It quoted a clause number that does not exist in my contract.”

Cause four, in its most dangerous form, and the fix is not a better prompt but a requirement that every claim carry a quote you can search for.

Why the order matters

Work through them in order. Context first, because it is the commonest and the cheapest to fix. Then the instruction. Then the format. Only then consider that the task may be out of reach.

People do it backwards: they conclude the model is not good enough while their prompt still contains no material. Two of the four causes are things you can fix in thirty seconds, and they account for most bad answers anybody gets.

The fifth thing, which is not a cause

Sometimes the answer is fine and you do not like it. It is accurate, well-formed, addresses what you asked, and says something you did not want to hear: the plan has a problem, the deadline is not achievable, the letter is weaker than you thought.

This is worth separating from the four causes, because it produces the same feeling and needs the opposite response. The tell is that you cannot say what is wrong with it, only that it is not what you were after. Pushing back here will get you agreement, because you already know what the training rewards, and the agreement will not be evidence of anything.