The prompts that worked last year are quietly backfiring on newer models like GPT-5.5 and Opus-4.7. Most people haven't caught it yet. If you're new here, I'm Dylan. I run an AI consultancy, and prompting comes up in almost every single client coaching call that I have. I've been running both models against client workflows since they came out. The habits everyone picked up over the last year are now hurting your output, not helping it. I see the same three habits over and over. Let me show you what they are and how to fix them. Let's get into it. There are many things that have changed between the previous models and the newest models today like GPT-5.5 and Opus-4.7. But, the primary thing that's changed that's impacting a lot of people's prompts is the fact that these models take you more literally, which means the words that we provide to these models are more important than ever. And the fact that these models take our words more seriously is what's impacting these three things I'm going to walk you through. So, here are the three prompt changes we need to make to ensure we're getting the most from these models. I'll walk you through each one of these more detail in a second, but as a quick overview, the first thing, which is really hard for me to change, is the fact that you need to stop telling the AI it's an expert in whatever field that it's working on for you. After that, we need to be explicit to the AI if there are specific files it needs to reference to achieve a task. We need to tell it what files to look at instead of assuming it's going to look at those files without us stating anything. And finally, with these new models, they can take many steps to achieve really complex tasks now, more steps than they could ever in the past. So, it's important that we ask the AI to tell us how many steps it's taken to ensure it's not skipped anything. So, those are the three fixes. We'll start with the first one, which is honestly probably one of the hardest for me to change because I've been doing it for so long. And that's simply dropping the role at the beginning of your prompt. And why does this matter? Well, there was a study done recently on GPT-5.5 and Opus-4.7. And what they did is they took the same AI with slightly different prompts on the same task. And all they changed in the prompts were adding a specific role at the beginning with the same task. In the second prompt, they just removed the role and had the task alone. The AI itself achieved the task at a much higher accuracy without the role. Now, the theory here is that when you add a role to an AI saying you're an expert writer, an expert strategist, or a salesperson, whatever else, it gets hyper-fixated on that role and spends a lot of time thinking about how it's going to convey that persona to the user instead of focusing on the the task at hand. And that's one way that this whole AI focusing on things literally is impacting the quality of the output you're getting from the AI. Quick pause in your regular programming. This video is brought to you by me, as always. Two quick things. First off, below is a 30-day AI Insight series, completely free. You'll get 30 insights in your inbox of how you can apply AI to your business and your work. The second thing is if you'd like to work with me, below are a series of offerings to see if there's a good fit between the two of us. Now, let's get back to the video. And the fix for this is simple. So, this here is a prompt that you would probably give to an older model. But with models like GPT-5.5 and Opus-4.7, you want to change this. Reason being is in this prompt, you're spending half of the time asking the AI to think about being a world-class expert in the specific field. And you've only given half of the space for the task, which is help me figure out my pricing strategy. A better prompt here would be something like this, where we remove the role completely and we focus more time on what we want and what good looks like. And that matters most for these models now. So, we need to be specific on the goal and the AI will figure out how to get there. So, here instead of saying it's a expert in given field, what we're doing instead is we're saying give me three pricing options. Each one should lead with a trade-off and cite the source for any numbers that you used. So, this is very specific on what good looks like and what we want from the AI, not worrying about the role at all. So, this is the first thing that we need to change is removing the role. The next thing we need to change in our prompts for these new models is naming the files when relevant. What do I mean by when relevant? Well, if you're doing something inside of a project, so many of you are using GPT projects, cloud projects, Gemini gems, or Copilot agents, they're all the same thing. You have a given AI that's targeted on a specific task that you want it to do over and over and over again. Well, in the past with these older models, yo
