By skyforbes 
After this, I stopped fighting the model and started collaborating with it.
I still remember the night I spent staring at my screen, frustrated beyond belief. I was trying to automate a small Python task with ChatGPT, nothing fancy, just converting a CSV into a neatly formatted HTML report, but no matter how I worded my prompts, the output was messy. Half the code was broken, variable names didn’t match, and the formatting was all over the place. I wasted hours tweaking prompts, thinking, “Maybe the model just doesn’t get me.”
Then it hit me: it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was me. I was approaching it like a magic box, throwing vague instructions at it and hoping for perfection. That’s when I realized I needed a framework — a structured way to write prompts that actually communicate my exact intent.
Start With the Problem, Not the Tool
I see beginners make this mistake all the time: they start with, “How can I use ChatGPT for X?” Instead, I flipped the question:
What problem am I trying to solve?
For me, it was: “I need to turn a messy CSV into an HTML report automatically.” That’s it. Simple, concrete, and actionable.