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Turn an engineer's Slack ramble into a help-center article

Practice: Asking for a format you can use. About 5 minutes.

About this exercise

An engineer explained in Slack how customers reconnect their thermostat to new Wi-Fi, and you need a help-center article from it. Write a title phrased as a question, then exactly 6 numbered steps, each one sentence that starts with a verb, under 120 words total, plain text. Use the engineer's corrected timing and none of the internal jargon. Write a prompt that gets you exactly that.

Common mistakes when you ask AI for this

  • Not giving the article a shape. The AI writes an intro paragraph, a Prerequisites section and sub-steps, so step counts drift. Try: Be exact: "A question title, then exactly 6 numbered steps, one sentence each, starting with a verb."
  • Trusting the AI to count words. AI is bad at counting. Ask for "under 120 words" and it often lands well over. Try: Cap each part instead: "each step under 16 words, title under 10 words."
  • Missing the correction. The thread says 5 seconds first and fixes it later; the AI often keeps the first number. Try: Add: "Hold the button 10 seconds (the engineer corrected 5)."
  • Keeping engineer talk. The AI repeats terms like "soft AP" and "re-provision" that customers don't know. Try: Add: "Customers read this. No jargon like soft AP, AP mode or re-provision."
  • Ignoring where it will be pasted. AI loves bold and headings, which show up as stray ** and # symbols in the help-center editor. Try: Name the place and the format: "For the help-center editor. Plain text, no bold or headings."

What a strong prompt includes

  • Sets the number of steps
  • Asks for a question title
  • Uses the corrected timing
  • Bans jargon
  • Sets a word limit

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