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The Broken Prompt Graveyard

Reviewed by Human · Updated July 14, 2026

Boss fight time.

Nine levels of training got you here. The next 50 minutes decide whether any of it stuck.

Why Do AI Prompts Fail?

**Broken prompt**: A prompt that forces the AI to guess what you want instead of telling it. Here's the thing. The model almost never fails first. Your prompt does. It fails before the AI reads a word — because the decisions were never made. Who's the audience? What's the format? How long? Skip those calls and the AI makes them for you. Badly. This gauntlet holds five prompts from the graveyard. Each one died a different death: vagueness, context overload, format chaos, persona mush, and one monster that combines them all.

You'll rewrite all five. No spectating.

All five broken prompts share one fatal gene. Can you name it before we start?

Your turn

Warm up your diagnostic eye. Read this prompt and list two decisions its writer never made: "Write something about our product launch."

Reflect

If you found more than two, good. That prompt skipped at least five.

Here's how the gauntlet works. Each module hands you one broken prompt. You diagnose it, rewrite it, then compare your fix against an expert rewrite. Score yourself honestly — the rubric lives in each challenge.

 

Everything you need comes from Arc 1: specificity, context, instructions, persona, format, length, iteration. If any of those feel shaky, revisit Context Is Everything before you start. Then come back and fight.

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Fix #1 — The Vague Request→