Build the Room Before You Write the Memo

Substack · Article

• When AI produces a mediocre draft, the problem is almost never the prompt — it is the quality and organisation of source materials fed to the model.
• Framework: treat AI generation as a function of input quality; organising documents, removing noise, and structuring sources before prompting is the highest-leverage intervention available.
• The memo analogy: you wouldn’t write a memo without a brief; similarly, don’t generate content without a structured source folder — the model’s output quality is bounded by its inputs.
• Practical takeaway: invest prep time in source organisation before generation. This returns better outputs than prompt engineering applied to a messy input set.