Lesson 2 of 4 · about 40 min

Your first useful prompt

पहला प्रॉम्प्ट — Role, facts, stop. Ek kaam, ek message. Phone se chalega.

A useful prompt is a small brief: who the tool is, what facts you pasted, what it must not invent, and when to stop. Practise on WhatsApp, study, or admin — not on a demo about New York.

The four-part brief

Write four lines before you open the app. (1) Role — “You are the WhatsApp desk for a kirana in Indore.” (2) Facts — paste only what is true today: items, hours, price if you already have it. (3) Output — “four short lines, Hindi or Hinglish, no English slogan.” (4) Stop — “If a price or delivery date is missing, write ‘ask the shop’, do not invent.”

That last line is the one Indian workplaces skip. A model will invent a 6 pm slot because it sounds helpful. Your customer will arrive. You will look like a liar.

Three India-shaped starts

Shop: “Customer asked if 5 kg atta is in stock. We have 2 kg. Draft a reply that offers 2 kg today and a time to confirm the rest. Do not promise a price I did not paste.”

Study: “You are an exam coach. Syllabus chunk: [paste]. Quiz me five questions. Wait for my answers. Do not dump a summary. If I go off-syllabus, say so.”

Office: “Rewrite this email to a vendor in Pune. Keep the date I wrote. Do not add a discount. Flag any sentence that sounds like a legal commitment.”

Phone-first, one screen

You do not need a laptop. Open Sarvam, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude on the phone. Paste the four-part brief. If the first reply is a US-style paragraph, send: “Shorter. Hinglish. No ‘dear valued customer’.”

Do not paste Aadhaar numbers, full bank statements, or a customer’s GSTIN plus home address into a consumer app unless you have already decided the tool’s privacy terms are acceptable. For this lesson, invent or redact names.

Exercise — show what you did

Run one real brief

Choose shop, study, or office. Write the four-part brief. Run it once in any free chat app. Edit one line by hand.

Do not send the result to a customer or teacher yet. You are collecting a draft.

A free editorial guide. Not a UGC university. Not Universal AI University, Karjat. Last reviewed 2026-08-29. All Foundation lessons.