Most people treat AI like an oracle. Type a problem, get a plan, follow the plan. One shot, one answer, done. No second opinion, no comparison, just blind trust that the first response is the right one.
There’s a different approach making the rounds on r/PromptEngineering right now, and it flips that model on its head. Instead of asking AI for THE plan, you ask for OPTIONS. Then you use your own judgment, or a deterministic checklist, to pick the winner. It sounds like a small tweak. It changes almost everything about how the output gets used.
A recent post pointed to a LeadDev piece on when to delegate work to AI and when not to. The core argument: AI is great at generating a wide field of possibilities fast. It’s much weaker at knowing which one is actually right for your specific situation. It doesn’t know your team’s skill level, your deadline pressure, your tech debt, or the political reality of your org. So stop asking it to be the decision-maker. Use it as the option-generator instead, and keep the decision where it belongs, with you.
One commenter on the thread nailed why this works: “You do not ask for what’s correct, you ask for possible answers and filter with deterministic logic that narrows the possibilities to the smallest number of correct answers.” Translation: let AI cast a wide net, then use rules you control (not vibes, not a second AI guess) to cut it down. The AI’s job is breadth. Your job is judgment.
Old Way vs New Way
Old way (ask for the plan):
- You: “How should I structure this database migration?”
- AI: gives you ONE plan, sounding confident
- You: either trust it blindly or waste an hour arguing with it, going back and forth trying to poke holes in a single answer that was never designed to be debated
New way (ask for options):
- You: “Give me 3 to 5 ways to structure this database migration, with tradeoffs for each”
- AI: lays out the field, rollback complexity, downtime risk, engineering effort, all side by side
- You: apply your own filter (cost, risk, team skill, deadline) and pick, with the reasoning fully visible instead of buried inside one confident-sounding paragraph
The difference comes down to false confidence. A single plan sounds authoritative whether or not it’s right. The model doesn’t hedge unless you ask it to, so a mediocre answer and a great one can read identically persuasive. A list of options forces you to actually think, and that’s where humans still beat the model. You bring context the AI doesn’t have: what broke last time, who’s out next sprint, what the CEO said in yesterday’s standup. None of that fits in a prompt, but all of it belongs in the filter.
How To Actually Do This 🛠️
- Ask for a spread, not a single answer. “Give me 4 different approaches” beats “what should I do.” The wider the spread, the more likely the actual best option shows up somewhere in the list, even if it wasn’t the first thing the model reached for.
- Force tradeoffs into the output. Add “list the downside of each option” so AI can’t dodge the hard parts. Models default to sounding upbeat about whatever they just proposed, so you have to explicitly demand the ugly side.
- Build your filter before you read the options. Decide what matters (speed, cost, maintainability) BEFORE AI answers, so you’re not swayed by whichever option sounds smartest. Write your criteria down first. Two lines is enough. It keeps you from rationalizing backward from whatever option reads best.
- Cut with logic, not vibes. Score each option against your filter. The best score wins, not the one written most persuasively. If two options tie, that’s useful information too, it usually means your filter needs one more criterion.
- Only bring in a second AI opinion if your filter can’t break a tie. Don’t default to asking AI to judge its own output. Save that step for genuine deadlocks.
This isn’t slower once the filter becomes a habit. It’s faster, because you stop re-litigating AI’s plan every time it turns out wrong. You stop the cycle of implement, discover a flaw, argue with the model, implement again. The filter approach front-loads the thinking so the back half of the project runs clean.
Bottom Line
Stop asking AI to make the call. Ask it to widen the field, then make the call yourself with rules you trust. That’s the real skill here, not prompting harder, filtering smarter!
Next time you’re mid-project and about to type “what should I do,” swap it for “give me options” and watch how much clearer the decision gets.
Stop asking AI for the plan. Ask it for options.
by u/Suspicious_Orchid770 in PromptEngineering