A Reddit builder dropped something small but clever yesterday. Worth 2 minutes of your time. It did not go viral. It did not have a slick landing page or a Product Hunt launch. Just a GitHub link and a short explanation in the comments. That is usually where the actually useful stuff lives.
Here is the mechanic: you paste in a messy task description. The tool fires back 3 clarifying questions. You answer. You get one clean, ready-to-use prompt. Total runtime: 60 seconds. The interface is dead simple, which is the point. No settings menu, no templates to browse, no subscription tier. You put words in, you get better words out, and the 3 questions are the bridge between those two states.
What “messy task description” means in practice: think about the last time you typed something like “write me an email about the project update” and got back something technically correct but completely wrong for the situation. Too formal. Wrong length. Missed the actual audience. That is not an AI problem. That is a specification problem. This tool forces you to fix the specification before the AI ever touches it.
The twist? The questions ARE the tool. Not the AI wrapper, not the interface. Just: who is this for, what tone, what is the goal. That is the whole mechanism. Most people skip those 3 questions and wonder why their prompts need 6 rounds of editing. The builder did not invent anything new here. These 3 questions exist in every copywriting framework, every creative brief ever written. What they did was automate the habit of asking them before you start, instead of figuring it out after you are already frustrated.
That is a genuinely underrated move. Building a tool that enforces a habit you already know you should have is more useful than building a tool that does something you could never do manually. You could always ask yourself these questions. Most of us just do not, because we are in a hurry and optimistic about how clear our vague instructions actually are.
🔧 Steal the mechanic manually right now:
- Write your task in one sentence. If it takes more than one sentence, the task is not defined yet. Break it down first.
- Ask: Who is this for? Be specific. “My boss” is different from “my boss who hates bullet points and only reads the first two lines.” “A beginner” is different from “a beginner who is frustrated and already tried two other approaches.” The more specific the person, the less the AI has to guess.
- Ask: What tone? Conversational or formal. Urgent or relaxed. Direct or diplomatic. Pick one. If you are stuck, think about how you would say it out loud to that person in a hallway. That instinct is usually right.
- Ask: What is the goal? Not the topic. The goal. “Explain X” is a topic. “Make them confident enough to try it themselves” is a goal. “Announce the update” is a topic. “Reassure them nothing breaks on their end” is a goal. That one reframe changes the output dramatically.
- Rewrite the prompt with those answers baked in. You will probably cut the original prompt by half and add back one very specific sentence. That sentence does all the work.
The builder automated exactly this loop. One commenter dismissed it with “lol why bother.” Understandable reaction from someone who has never tracked how much time vague prompts cost per week. Spoiler: it is a lot. If you are using AI for more than a few tasks a day, bad prompt habits compound fast. You write something vague, you get something almost-right, you tweak it, you get something still-almost-right, and somewhere in round four you forget what you were originally trying to do. That cycle is not a productivity win. It is a productivity leak dressed up as working hard. The 3-question filter breaks the cycle at the start instead of at round four.
💡 Pro tip: Save those 3 questions as a sticky note or phone reminder. Run every new prompt through them before you hit send. Thirty seconds of friction upfront kills fifteen minutes of back-and-forth on the other side. If you work with a team that uses AI together, drop these 3 questions into your shared prompt library or team wiki. When everyone answers the same 3 questions before they prompt, output quality across the team goes up without any training docs or process meetings. It just becomes the default. And one more use case worth noting: this works beyond AI prompts. Try it before writing a Slack message you know will get misread. Try it before starting a doc that always ends up needing three rounds of feedback. Most communication problems are specification problems wearing a different costume.
🎯 Try it on whatever you are building next. The 3-question filter works whether you use this tool or just do it by hand. If you want the automated version, the Reddit thread is worth finding. If you want to start in the next 60 seconds, you already have everything you need right here.
Built a thing that turns your messy idea into a perfect AI prompt in 60 seconds.
by u/Mr_Writer_206 in ChatGPTPromptGenius