The day · Page 35
Paste the ugly prompt
Give this to the room
Do not polish your first prompt. Generate it with a thinking tool, Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, paste it into the build tool, and run it. Do not even read it first. See the result, then fix it.
For you only
This is the advice that surprises every room, so be ready to defend it, because it is the method, and it works for three reasons.
One, you do not have time. Six hours sounds long until you subtract lunch, snack runs, and the last hour of sharpening the demo. A team that spends forty minutes debating prompt wording has spent forty minutes building nothing. The first prompt has one job: get a first version on a screen.
Two, a wrong screen teaches faster than a perfect plan. A team staring at an empty canvas trades opinions. A team staring at a wrong screen makes decisions: make the list a feed, kill the dashboard, the button should be the whole page. Wrong things are easy to react to, which is why you want one fast.
Three, and this is the part nobody expects: the tool's first guess is inspiration. The build tool will add things you never asked for. A filter, an empty state, a strange little stats panel. You delete most of it. Sometimes it is better than what you had in mind, and the team's idea grows in a direction no whiteboard would have found. Treat the build tool as a companion that brainstorms in working software, not as a typist taking dictation. Steal its accidents.
I do this live on stage. At UX CE 2026 in Berlin I generated a first prompt, pasted it into Lovable without reading it, and let the audience watch what came back while I kept talking. The point was never the tool. The point was the order of operations: build first, judge after.
PRO TIPS
- The brief is most of the first prompt. One paragraph: the user, the moment, the goal, and a request for the first screen. Then stop typing and press run.
- After the first result, change one thing at a time. Small prompts, fast loops, look between every loop.
- When a prompt conversation goes in circles twice, do not argue with it. Start a fresh build and paste in a new first prompt. It is almost always faster.