I’ve been calling this section “Prompt Lab” since I launched it, but I’m changing the name to Content Lab.
The reason is sitting right inside this post: what I’m exploring has quietly outgrown prompt mechanics.
It’s become about knowledge design, genre, communication systems — the whole environment in which a prompt lives.
The prompt is often the last thing I write now, not the first.
For content professionals and technical writers, that shift matters. We've always known that good content doesn't start with writing. It starts with architecture. Information types, audience analysis, structured authoring, content strategy.
Here is what I mean.
The Meta Problem
The students in my AI writing class have been struggling with something I didn’t anticipate. The assignment asks them to analyze their AI-assisted writing process and document their findings, which includes the prompts they built and what they learned from them.
Straightforward enough, or so I thought. But I ran into a consistent problem.
Students would revise their prompts. They’d revise their notes. But they wouldn’t revise how they were communicating their findings to an outside audience.
They were writing for themselves, not for a reader who needed to understand what they did and why it mattered.
When I dug into it, I realized I was asking them to do something genuinely difficult — not just create a prompt, but produce a professional document about the process of creating one.
That’s a meta-cognitive task. And it requires knowing what genre you’re working in.
After talking with students, I realized some had never been introduced to genre as a concept for professional writing.
English majors generally fared better, not because they’re stronger writers, but because they had a conceptual vocabulary for what I was asking. They could name the shape of the document before they built it.
You might think: “Well, why didn’t students just use AI to help them figure out the right genre?”
Because if you don’t know what genre you need (or what genre even is as a functional concept), you don’t know what to ask for.
Genre knowledge has to exist in your head before it can inform your collaboration with an AI. It’s not a skill you can offload.
So I built a Claude app to help.
Building a Genre Coach Solution
The prompt I’m sharing below is a writing coach that gives students exactly two specific revision actions to move their draft toward professional case study format. It identifies
where description has replaced analysis,
where evidence is missing, and
where the reasoning behind AI choices is vague.
Then it shows students a before-and-after example using their own words, so the feedback is immediate and concrete.
But I want to be clear, I didn’t write it in a vacuum. I drafted it inside my Claude project for this class, which contains my course materials, my genre presentation, my assignment descriptions, and my own running reflections on how the class has been going.
Claude wasn’t just following instructions. It was working from a situated context build around my course, my students, and my specific pedagogical problem.
That’s a different relationship to prompting than I had even a year ago. I’m not just writing better prompts. I’m building better environments, and the prompts emerge from those environments almost naturally.
The work that happens before you open the chat window is where the real leverage is.
Your knowledge base has become as important as your prompting technique — maybe more so. A mediocre prompt inside a rich, well-structured project context will often outperform a brilliant prompt written cold.
The work that happens before you open the chat window is where the real leverage is.
This has gotten me thinking … if genre knowledge is a prerequisite for effective AI collaboration, what other conceptual frameworks are quietly limiting what we can do with these tools?
For content professionals, I'd argue the answer is already in our toolkit — information typing, structured authoring, audience modeling.
The field has been building toward this kind of AI-ready thinking for decades without knowing it.
I'd love to hear what you're seeing in your own work. Where is your content expertise giving you an edge, and where are you still running into walls?
System Prompt: Writing Genre Coach
I'm running this as a Claude app inside my AI writing course project, which means it already has context about my assignments, my students, and what a finished case study should look like.
Students paste in their draft and get two specific, actionable revision notes back — no vague feedback, no overwhelming list of changes.
If you're teaching writing or working with teams who need to document processes and decisions, you could adapt this easily.
Just swap out the case study definition for whatever professional genre your context requires, and feed it any relevant background materials you have. The tighter your project context, the more targeted the feedback gets.
