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NO. 14 · Practice

Before You Borrow a Prompt — Checking the Source and Six Blank Lines

Translated from the Korean original by AI; native-speaker review pending.

Why doesn't a prompt someone shared work when you paste it as is? How to pick official material, and six pre-fill lines that work with any prompt.

This article was drafted together with AI and reviewed by an editor. It draws on an external article, which is credited at the bottom.

Getting prompts from social media comments and using them is common. Borrowing them is a good habit in itself, but there are many cases where pasting them as is does not work. Here are our standards.

Check the source first

Where possible, we look first at official material from the company that made the tool. The article we referred to says it opened Anthropic's public official prompt library and sorted the prompts into those that work right in a chat window, those that require pasting in materials, and those that require developer tools. This classification idea is useful. Sorting out first whether a prompt works in your own environment saves time.

Assumptions that disappear in translation and passing along

When a foreign prompt is translated into Korean, the assumption that "this tool already knows me" sometimes disappears. The AI in a fresh chat window does not know me. It then either asks back or strings together ordinary generalities. The article we referred to explains that it discovered this problem by running the prompts itself. We may run into the same problem, so before writing a prompt, we first fill in what the AI does not know.

Six pre-fill lines that work with any prompt

If it is a prompt about a business idea, fill in the six lines below first.

  1. Work you have actually done and been paid for (tasks, not job titles)
  2. What people often ask you
  3. Hours you can spend per week
  4. Money you can use now
  5. People you can already reach
  6. Target amount and deadline

State explicitly: "Keep only one"

If you ask AI something big, it lists things big. Listing is safe, and choosing carries responsibility. So at the end of each step we ask for "keep only one and give the reason in one sentence." Candidates must narrow from five to one before moving on to the next step.

Final check

Do not put your personal information into a borrowed prompt, and verify the numbers and facts in the results against sources separately.

Further reading

This article was rewritten from our own team's perspective and standards, drawing on the concerns raised in the articles below. We did not follow their wording or structure, and where we could not verify a figure an original article cited against the primary data, we marked it as such. For some of the original articles, the full text opens only after logging in, so we read them based on the publicly available portion.

Also checked against other sources:

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