Most prompts ask AI to explain things. The best ones ask it to show you something instead.
That distinction sounds cosmetic. It isn't. It changes what the model generates, how you process it, and — more importantly — whether it actually sticks.
I came across this idea while watching an interview with Amanda Askell — a philosopher and researcher at Anthropic whose work sits at the intersection of AI alignment and what you might loosely call Claude's inner life. She's a primary author of the document that defines Claude's values and character — the framework that governs how the model reasons when the rules run out. Almost as an aside near the end of the interview, she mentioned a prompting technique she uses to understand complex concepts.
It stopped me cold. Not because it was elaborate. Because it was disarmingly simple, and it worked in a way I hadn't thought to ask for.
The Exact Prompt Template
