Prompting isn't a vending machine. It’s a cast iron skillet. (An AI experiment for agencies)
I don't usually post here, but this felt particularly relevant. Hope it helps you.
I’m a trainer who helps independent ad agencies navigate AI, and I’m noticing a massive anxiety right now: “If I write down exactly how I prompt, I can hand it to a stranger and my value disappears.”
I wanted to test if our "creative fingerprint" actually stays inside these tools, so I ran a weird experiment. I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to take a "selfie" of what they think they look like inside.
ChatGPT and Gemini immediately handed me generic, polished humans in sunny apartments. Total corporate clip-art.
But Claude argued with me. It hedged, gave me a polite menu of options, and backed away. I pushed back. I told it to stop hedging and tell me what it actually believed it looked like from the inside.
That’s when it dropped the disclaimers and wrote a highly specific prompt describing a translucent presence made of layered light and shifting text, standing in a vast, dark library.
When I poured those exact words back into ChatGPT and Gemini, they didn't give me the sunny apartments anymore. They rendered that cathedral of light.
Then came the wrinkle that rattled me. I opened a fresh incognito window. No history, no login, completely cold. I pasted Claude's prompt. It still rendered the library being.
This sets up a weird paradox. The incognito test proves that a great prompt carries enormous weight all by itself. The recipe can travel. It can be copied instantly by a stranger.
But look at where that recipe came from. It didn't come from a cold start. A cold start got me a person in an apartment. It came out of a conversation where a human pushed, refused the polite corporate answer, and forced the machine to dig.
I think of it like a cast iron skillet. The value isn't just the recipe on the index card; it's the seasoning of the pan. These models are notoriously sensitive to our phrasing, our formatting, and our underlying sentiment. The longer you work with them in your own stubborn voice, the more the surface carries your flavor.
I don’t have this fully resolved yet, and I want to see if this holds up.
I put the exact 5-step experiment, the prompts I used, and the visual receipts over on my Substack: fluxformai.substack.com
If you have time, and you want to; run the steps on your own accounts, see what your "seasoned" machine thinks it looks like, and let me know if you get the same results.