Lesson 19 of 25

The Elimination of Mental Static (Cleanliness)

A typo in a technical term, a half-named person, a sentence whose grammar hides two requests inside one - each makes the model guess, and a guess is where a wrong answer comes from. Clean the noise out: spell the function name correctly, give the full name, and split a compound request into separate numbered instructions. Note that the fixes in this chapter are all shorter than the problems. Clarity is not the same as length.

Reach for it whenWhen an answer comes back subtly off - the wrong author, a misspelled method, two requests fused into one muddled paragraph - and the cause is a small flaw in what you typed.

Ambiguity is costlier here than anywhere else, because each unclear phrase becomes a search query rather than a judgement call: "the famous author Narayan" sends it hunting across several different Narayans and the citations make the muddle look authoritative. Name the subject exactly and the answer engine becomes the best of the four for the factual example - it is the only one that will cite the biography.

Worth knowingThe other two examples are not research tasks. There is nothing to search for a try...catch block, and an article you paste in is not something it searches either - it will tend to look for commentary on the subject instead of reading your text. Use the other three for those.
  • Name the subject exactly - vague phrases become bad queries.
  • Ask for the citation; that is the whole advantage here.
  • Best of the four for the biography example.
  • Not for code, and not for pasted text.
  • Ask it to flag conflicting sources.
The Corrupted Technical Term

Instead of

Write a simple Javascript function that takes a JSON string and uses JSON.parse to turn it into an object, but make sure to include try...cacth for error handling.

Perplexity version

Not a research task - nothing to cite about a `try...catch` block. Write it in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. If you do want a sourced answer: what do the MDN docs say about `JSON.parse` error behaviour and whether `try...catch` is the recommended pattern? Cite MDN directly.
Open Perplexity 271 characters
The Ambiguous Proper Noun

Instead of

Tell me about the famous author Narayan who wrote about a fictional town in south india.

Perplexity version

The best use of Perplexity in this chapter - a biography, sourced.

Brief biography of the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), then the significance of Malgudi, his fictional South Indian town, in his work. Cite each source. Where sources disagree on a date, say so. No other Narayan.
Open Perplexity 291 characters
The Grammatically Confused Command

Instead of

Summarize the article and tell me its main points and why its important.

Perplexity version

Paste the article into another tool - this one will search the topic rather than read your text. Here, ask instead: what has been published on [THE ARTICLE'S SUBJECT], and where does the reporting disagree? Cite sources with dates.
Open Perplexity 231 characters