Early Adoptr: Simplifying AI For Founders & Small Businesses24 Des 2025

Holiday Rewind: How to Get AI to Actually Do What You Want - Prompt Engineering That Doesn't Suck

We're off for the holidays so this is a re-release of one of our most popular episodes. Kyle and Jess completely overhaul their most popular episode on prompt engineering, because GPT-5 isn't just faster than GPT-4 - it's fundamentally different. It follows instructions with "surgical precision," handles 800 pages of context at once, and will get confused if you give it contradictory prompts that older models would just ignore. Not to mention there's been a whole host of other updates to prompt engineering that deserve attention too.

We dive deep into why role prompting (like "act as a marketing expert") is largely ineffective according to new research, introduce the game-changing 4C Framework that actually works with GPT-5's precision, and show you how few-shot prompting can boost accuracy from 0% to 90%.

Whether you're frustrated with generic AI responses, wondering why your old prompts don't work as well anymore, or ready to master the communication skills that'll give you a massive competitive advantage, this episode is your roadmap to prompt engineering mastery in 2025.

What You'll Learn:

Why GPT-5's "surgical precision" requires completely different prompting strategies than GPT-4
The 4C Framework: Clear, Context, Constraints, and Calibration for consistent AI results
Why "act like an expert" prompts fail and how few-shot examples boost accuracy by 90%
How to leverage GPT-5's massive 400,000 token context window for complex business analysis
The difference between GPT-5's fast mode and deep reasoning mode - and when to use each
Real business scenarios: analyzing sales data, communicating project delays, and investor presentations

05:00 Revisiting Prompt Engineering - Why It Matters

08:16 Prompt Engineering: How Is GPT-5 Different?

17:53 Updating Commonly Held Beliefs About Prompt Engineering

19:58 WTF is Shot Prompting and How Does It Help Write Better Prompts?

21:45 Why You Need to Prioritize Your Context in Prompt Engineering

22:36 Decomposition and Self-Criticism in Prompt Engineering

25:32 Introducing the 4Cs Framework (+P) of Prompt Engineering

34:23 Applying the 4C Framework in the Real World

56:09 Quick Wins for Effective Prompt Engineering: Updated

Get in touch with Early Adoptr: hello@earlyadoptr.ai

Follow Us on Socials & Resources:

IG: https://instagram.com/early_adoptr

TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@early_adoptr

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@early_adoptr

Substack: https://substack.com/@earlyadoptrpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(68)

Open Weight AI Models: How to Cut Your Dependence on Big AI

Open weight AI models could give your business more control over AI costs, data privacy and the tools you depend on, but they also mean giving up some of the convenience of ChatGPT and Claude. So when...

26 Aug 55min

AI Transparency Rules Are Here: What Small Businesses Need to Know About EU AI Act Article 50 (w/ Dr Barry Scannell)

The EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules are already in force, and they apply to your business whether you're in Dublin or Denver. But what does it actually mean? Do you need to label every piece...

19 Aug 54min

How to Be a Good Human in the Loop with AI

We talk a lot about keeping a human in the loop, but what does that actually mean in your day to day? You read the AI output, it looks right, you approve it, and you move on. But from late 2027 that m...

12 Aug 58min

Local AI: How to Run Private, Low-Cost AI on Your Own Computer

What if your AI ran entirely on a laptop you own, added nothing to your monthly bill, and never sent your data anywhere? That's local AI. It might sound too good to be true, but as token costs climb a...

5 Aug 56min

Just Because You CAN Vibe Code....SHOULD You Vibe Code? (w/ Sean Bhardwaj)

Vibe coding can build you almost anything now. A customer database, a little internal tool, a whole CRM in an afternoon. But some of those things could land you in a world of GDPR pain, and one or two...

29 Jul 1h 6min

Vibe Coding: What to Do After the App Is Built

So you've vibe coded an app....now what? Vibe coding gives almost anyone the ability to build a working app in an afternoon. In fact, around 63% of people building this way right now have no coding ba...

22 Jul 56min

Agentic Loops: The Engine Behind Vibe Coding

Agentic loops are already running in your business. If you have given an AI tool a research question, walked away, and come back to a finished brief, you have used one. The same mechanism fires a paym...

15 Jul 49min

Claude Code Without the Code: A Non-Developer's Week in Review (w/ Sean Bhardwaj)

Last week, Kyle and special guest Sean debated whether Claude Code is worth switching to if you don't know how to code. The answer was: it depends. So Sean spent the following week finding out. In thi...

8 Jul 1h 7min