VandeHei's 5 Prompting Tricks for AI's Top 10%
SkimNews Take
The tutorial series aims to bridge the gap between AI's perceived potential and its current practical utility for users, suggesting a widespread frustration with existing tools' out-of-the-box performance.
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Jim VandeHei launched a four-day Axios Finish Line series promising specific, actionable AI improvements: better prompting (Monday), improving AI memory (Tuesday), starting a business with AI (Wednesday), and running a business with AI (Thursday).
- VandeHei argues the gap between users getting '10x value' from AI and those getting 'Google-level search results' is about asking the right question with the right context — not brain power or tech skills.
- The column recommends paying $20/month to access the newest models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, arguing the free tier causes users to miss out on week-to-week and month-to-month improvements.
- Five prompting techniques are demonstrated with example prompts: (1) feed AI maximum context about your job, industry, audience, and stakes; (2) ask AI what it needs from you by posing five sharpening questions; (3) show AI five previous columns so it commits to your style and voice; (4) push harder by requesting sharper, shorter, less corporate rewrites; (5) turn one-time wins into reusable 'Super Prompts' by asking AI to reverse engineer the output into a permanent template.
- A pro tip suggests using voice input rather than typing so users naturally supply AI with more context, faster.
- The bottom line in the column: doing these five things will instantly place readers in the top 10% of AI users overnight, per VandeHei.
Why it matters: VandeHei is leveraging Axios's media platform to push a thesis that the AI skill gap is a prompting gap — a framing that conveniently funnels readers toward $20/month subscriptions to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The column's repeatable 'Super Prompts' technique turns a one-off interaction into a permanent personal template, which is the mechanism by which casual users compound their AI value over time.
