A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend about AI. They told me they had bought two of the highest tier Claude plans, had two computers running Claude Code, and still often ran out of tokens. 

Their enthusiasm for making new things with AI was contagious. They told me they wished they’d started with Claude Code six months earlier, when their friends were nudging them about it. “This is your nudge,” they told me. 

What they gave me was a prompt; a call to action. I felt grateful for it. Just last week, I booted up Claude Cowork again—I tried it when it was in beta—and wow, it completed an important, laborious, task in minutes. (That task would’ve taken a person like me hours… not to mention all of the dread before the task.) 

I felt grateful for my friend’s nudge.

Just the other day, another friend prompted me to sign up for a car sharing service that they had a good experience with. And a few years ago, yet another friend prompted me to have a second look at one of my subscription bills and get rid of services I wasn’t using. I actually did that one live, and every month I save that money now.

While the term “prompt engineering” is mostly geared towards getting AI to take action, your friends can benefit from your prompting as well, and you can benefit from theirs. (My book, Creative Doing, is full of prompts for the creative process.)