You will be able to recognise tasks that are too big for one request and explain why.
Aisha coordinates projects at a mid-sized accounting firm in the CBD. Her director asked for a proposal on moving the firm's annual staff retreat from a Bintan resort to somewhere in Singapore, with options, costs, pros and cons, and a recommendation. She had learnt the lessons of module 1, so she wrote one careful prompt with full context, the task, a length limit and a format, and asked for the whole thing in a single go. What came back was four tidy pages that looked like a proposal and said very little. The options were generic, the costs were vague ranges, and the recommendation read as if it had been decided before the comparison was written.
Her prompt was not badly written. It asked for too much at once.
Look closely and Aisha's request contained at least four separate jobs: finding suitable venues, working out what each would cost for about 120 people, weighing them against what the firm cares about, and writing the case persuasively for a director. Each of those is a real piece of work, and she was asking the model to do all four in a single pass.
When one request asks for research, analysis and a polished document together, each part gets shallow treatment. The model writes the answer from start to finish in one go, and the effort is spread over everything. Polish comes out fine, because it is what models do most easily. The research and analysis, which needed the most thought, get the least, and the polish then makes the thin parts harder to notice.
There is a second, less obvious problem. AI fundamentals lesson 3.2, It writes by predicting the next token, again and again, explained that each part of an answer is written with everything before it in view, and nothing already written is revised. So if an early part is wrong, the later parts are built on it.
In Aisha's draft, the model had assumed early on that the retreat would be a single day. It was meant to be two days and a night. Every cost after that was for a day event, the venue shortlist leaned towards places without accommodation, and the recommendation favoured the cheapest day option. One wrong assumption near the top shaped four pages, and she only spotted it on her second read.
In a single giant request, you get no chance to catch that kind of error until the end, when fixing it means starting again.
Think about how you would hand this job to a capable junior colleague. You would not ask for the finished proposal on day one and wait. More likely you would ask for a shortlist first, look at it and cross off the two places the director dislikes, then ask for costs on the rest and check those before anyone started on the write-up, with each step small enough to review in a few minutes.
Working with an assistant in steps gives you the same checkpoints. You see the shortlist before any costs are worked out, and the costs before the argument is built. When something is wrong, you fix it at the step where it happened, and everything after starts from the corrected version. The rest of this module shows how to do this well. Lesson 3.2, Ask for the plan before the work, starts with the most useful single step.
Splitting a job does take more messages. It rarely takes more time, because you stop spending an hour editing a long draft that was built on a wrong assumption.
Before you write a request, try to say in one sentence what a good output looks like. "A 120-word reply to this customer that confirms the new delivery date and apologises once" passes. You know exactly what you are asking for, and you will know it when you see it.
"A proposal on the retreat with options, costs and a recommendation" does not pass. It sounds like one sentence, but try to say what a good version looks like and you need several: the right venues, accurate costs, a fair comparison, a clear argument. When describing a good output takes a paragraph, the task is several tasks, and each of them deserves its own request.
Watch also for a prompt that strings four or five different verbs together with "and", or one that needs both research and persuasive writing, or an output you expect to run to several pages, since any of these suggests the job should be split.
The hard part is often noticing the steps at all. When you do a big task yourself, the steps blur together because you move between them without thinking. Aisha's retreat proposal felt like one job until she wrote down what she had actually done the previous year: gathered requirements from the director, shortlisted venues, called for quotes, built a comparison, chosen, written the proposal, and revised it after comments. Seven steps, and only two of them were writing.
That list is the starting point for everything else in this module. So think back over the last few weeks. Somewhere in there is a piece of work that took you more than two hours from start to finish, the kind you might hand to an assistant next time round.
Pick a task that took you more than two hours recently and list the separate steps it actually involved.
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