JULY 15, 2025

• PromptCraft: Mirroring, Simplification, and "The Only Prompt That Actually Matters"
• These 3 ChatGPT Tools Cut 75% of My Work Every Day​
• THE HEADLINES
• Tool Spotlight: MagicSchool: AI That Puts Time Back in Teachers’ Hands

Mirroring, Simplification, and "The Only Prompt That Actually Matters"

• ​Why GPT Sounds Like Hemingway: Essay argues GPT’s default “flat, declarative” voice springs from a century of U.S. journalistic and mass-market prose, with Hemingway as patient zero—because that lean style dominates the model’s training corpus, the bot statistically drifts there whenever tone is unspecified. offshore westerly​
• ​Prompting Got Easier When I Stopped Over-Complicating It: Author replaces elaborate “act-as” role-play with a three-part template—1-sentence objective, 3-5 bullet context, explicit output format—and reports sharper, more actionable results than 90 % of fancy prompts. Reddit​
• ​🛞 The One-Line “Mirror” Prompt: A single enigmatic sentence is presented as a diagnostic handshake; how the model responds allegedly reveals its capacity for recursion, humility, and genuine reflection, separating “presence” from mere pattern-matching. Reddit​
• ​“The Only Prompt That Actually Matters”: Post claims most LLM gimmicks are noise; the real power lies in one request: “Outline every dimension of my ask, highlight uncertainties, then fire clarifying questions.” Forces the model—and the user—to think deeper before generating. Reddit​
• ​Help! Need a Genius Prompt to Learn SPSS in 48 Hours: Student crowdsources a high-intensity study prompt that can break SPSS concepts into bite-size lessons, auto-generate dummy datasets, run ANOVA/regression demos and explain output like a tutor—all under a two-day deadline. Reddit​

These 3 ChatGPT Tools Cut 75% of My Work Every Day

Look, I get that people like Marvel movies. To a certain extent, I do, too.

I was pleasantly surprised by the first Iron Man, a character I couldn’t have cared less about before Robert Downey, Jr., donned his metallic red and gold.

That led me to follow the MCU into the “origin movies” about the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America.

And, I cheered along with hundreds of others inside my theater when we finally got to see all of them together in that first Avengers film.

But then, something happened that was not unfamiliar to me.

I realized the charm that first drew me to the characters had faded as the storylines progressed into multiverses and potential universe-shattering cataclysm after cataclysm.

The movies quickly began to reek of the same crap that killed mainstream comics through “maxi-series,” crossovers, and contrived character changes that could be undone or neutralized with the waving of a magic wand.

I checked out not long after Avengers because I noticed things like:

• No real stakes because nothing is permanent
• Multiverse as a way to milk their cash cows, no matter what happens
• Ongoing storylines void of any compelling character development
• Endings that devolve into cosmic CGI attractions where the promise is “things will never be the same,” even though you know damn well they’ll be exactly the same if you wait just a little bit longer

All flash, no substance, in other words.

AI News Is Starting to Remind Me of That.

I used to get excited by the announcement of each new model. I’ve no doubt that their capabilities are improving.

But then, I ask myself: how much smarter do my models need to be to do the work that I need them to do right now?

Complexity creeps in. Whenever that happens, I find the best thing to do is simplify. Go back to basics.

Instead of jumping into MCPs or Grok 4’s benchmarks or building an agent for the sake of building an agent, step back and return to ways that AI is actually useful.

As some of you may know, I publish the mAIn Street newsletter four times per week, Tuesday through Friday. I’ve tried to build agents that created all or most of the newsletter edition at once.

It only frustrated me.

It would start well, then lose the plot. Or, worse, it would make things up that caused so much manual freakout in me that it defeated the purpose of using AI at all.

(Re)-Enter Custom GPTs.

​CLICK HERE TO SEE THE 3 SAVING ME TONS OF TIME, AND LEARN HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN​

• ​Microsoft shares $500M in AI savings internally days after cutting 9,000 jobs​
• ​A New Kind of AI Model Lets Data Owners Take Control​
• ​AI: Major Threat or Just the Next Tech Thing?​
• ​Breakout Watch: 3 Reasons to Monitor Toast Stock​
• ​Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Medical Devices​
• ​‘A Huge Step’—Coinbase CEO Issues ‘10x’ AI-Crypto Prediction as Bitcoin Eyes $200,000​
• ​Amazon Is Making a $40 Million Movie About the OpenAI Boardroom Meltdown​
• ​What Does Super-Powerful AI Look Like?​
• ​Future Forecasting: The S-Curve Path to AGI by 2040​
• ​‘I’ve £90k in Student Debt—For What?’ Grads Struggle in an AI-Shaken Job Market​
• ​Is AI Accelerating the UK Job-Market Slowdown?​
• ​AI Voice-Cloning Scams Are Rising—Here’s How to Protect Yourself​
• ​Swiss Summer, a Stuck Shutter—and How to AI-Proof Your Career​
• ​Lay Beliefs About AI Assessing Interpersonal Skills in Hiring​
• ​New Director Takes Helm at Colby’s Davis Institute for AI​
• ​Meet the Instagram Influencer at Wimbledon Who’s Entirely AI-Generated​
• ​FDA Clears AI-Based Visualization Software for Surgical Breast-Cancer Care​
• ​Scientists Reportedly Hiding AI Text Prompts in Academic Papers for Positive Peer Review​
• ​Can Nvidia Persuade Governments to Pay for ‘Sovereign’ AI?​
• ​Nvidia’s Huang Says China’s Military Unlikely to Use US AI Chips​
• ​Malaysia to Require Permits on Trade of High-End US AI Chips​
• ​The Dirty Secret About AI in the Office That Has CEOs Admitting Millions of White-Collar Jobs Will Be Replaced​
• ​Prediction: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Stock Is the Safest AI Chip Bet​
• ​China’s Moonshot AI Releases Open-Source Model to Reclaim Market Position​
• ​Study Warns of ‘Significant Risks’ in Using AI Therapy Chatbots​
• ​Siemens and SAP Call for EU to Revise Its AI Regulations​
• ​Apple Faces Calls to Reboot AI Strategy With Shares Slumping​
• ​I Went on a Date With My AI Dream Guy—Then I Cried Over Shrimp​
• ​Meta’s Zuckerberg Pledges Hundreds of Billions for AI Data Centers​
• ​Pentagon Awards $200 Million AI Contracts to Four Tech Companies​
• ​AI in K-12 Education: Partners in Progress, Not Replacements​
• ​Is BigBear.ai Stock Heading to $20?​
• ​AI and the Catholic Moment​
• ​Trump to Unveil $70 Billion in AI and Energy Investments​
• ​Pentagon Will Use Elon Musk’s AI Software Grok​
• ​Elon Musk’s Grok Is Making AI Companions—Including a Goth Anime Girl​
• ​Cognition, Maker of the AI Coding Agent Devin, Acquires Windsurf​

MagicSchool: AI That Puts Time Back in Teachers’ Hands

​MagicSchool AI is a classroom-ready suite of 80-plus generative-AI tools designed by educators, for educators to erase the drudgery behind lesson prep and student support.

From instant, standards-aligned lesson plans, differentiated assessments, IEP drafts, and parent emails to rap-battle writing prompts and chatbots that role-play historical figures, MagicSchool saves the average teacher 7–10 hours a week—freeing them to focus on the human side of teaching.

Privacy and equity are baked in. The platform tops Common Sense’s rankings with a 93 % privacy score, offers AI-literacy guardrails for students, and lets districts fine-tune tool access, moderation rules, and even build custom chatbots from their own documents.

Seamless integrations with Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Microsoft 365, and single sign-on mean MagicSchool drops straight into existing workflows, while real-time analytics help spot which students are soaring or need extra support.

Already trusted by 13,000+ districts in 160 countries—and backed by ESSA evidence of boosting literacy outcomes—MagicSchool AI turns generative AI into a safe, scalable, and genuinely magical time saver for educators everywhere.

​Read All mAIn Street Back Issues Here​

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