Five cheat codes for sharper conversations with Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI worth talking to.
Most people use AI like a search bar. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. These five techniques change that — they turn the conversation into a thinking tool. Each one helps you find blind spots, stress-test ideas, and stop nodding along to your own assumptions. Free, fast, and roughly nobody uses them. That's why they feel like cheat codes.
Each technique answers a different kind of question. Pre-mortem looks at future failures. Steelman strengthens opposing views. Red Team attacks your own plan. First Principles strips problems to atoms. ELI5 cuts through jargon. Used together, they turn any AI conversation into something closer to a thoughtful collaborator.
Imagine the failure. Work backwards. Fix it before it happens.
You pretend the thing already happened — and it failed. Then you ask "why?" It's the opposite of looking back at a disaster. You look forward at one that might happen, and fix the most likely causes before they get the chance to bite. Like a fire drill for plans.
When you're attached to a plan, your brain protects it. You see the bright side. A pre-mortem flips your mental posture from "convince me this is good" to "convince me this is doomed" — which is the only stance that surfaces the real risks. Coined by decision researcher Gary Klein. Wildly underused.
Make the other side's argument stronger than they would.
A "strawman" is when you argue against a weak, distorted version of the opposing view — easy to knock down, easy to feel smug. A steelman is the opposite: build the strongest possible case for the position you don't agree with. Then respond to that version. You either change your mind, or you win the argument fair and square.
It's the antidote to confirmation bias. It forces you to take opposing views seriously instead of caricaturing them. It also makes you genuinely harder to argue with — because you've already done the work of seeing the other side at its strongest.
Attack your own plan to find the holes — before someone else does.
In military and cybersecurity, the Red Team is the group whose only job is to find weaknesses, attack the system, break the plan. In prompting, you ask the AI to play that role: hostile critic, skeptical reviewer, the hardest reader you'll ever face. Not to be mean — to surface problems while there's still time to fix them.
When you make something, you fall in love with it. You see what you intended, not what's actually on the page. A Red Team prompt forces the AI into adversarial mode — pointing out everything you can't see because you're too close. Think of it as inviting friends over to try to climb your treehouse before the storm arrives.
Strip the problem to atoms. Build a new answer up from there.
Most thinking happens by analogy: "we do X because everyone does X" or "X is like Y, so let's copy Y." First Principles is the opposite — you peel away every assumption, every convention, every "that's just how it's done," until you're left with the basic, undeniable facts. Then you reason up from those facts instead of sideways from convention.
Elon Musk's classic example: rockets cost $65 million because that's what rockets cost. First-principles version — what are rockets actually made of? Aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. What do those raw materials cost? About 2% of the final price. So the cost isn't the materials — it's the manufacturing approach. That insight is how SpaceX exists. The technique unlocks solutions that look nothing like the conventional ones.
Explain Like I'm 5. Cut through the jargon. Build real understanding.
A request for the explanation to be simple. No jargon, no fancy words, lots of analogies. Born on Reddit (r/explainlikeimfive) for exactly this reason — experts had forgotten how to talk to non-experts. The trick: you're not actually a 5-year-old. The phrase is shorthand for "explain it as if I'm smart and curious, but I have zero background in this field."
AI models love to puff up their explanations with technical language. ELI5 forces clarity. If the AI can't explain something simply, it doesn't actually understand it — or it's hiding behind jargon. Bonus: variations like ELI10, ELI-teenager, ELI-PhD-from-another-field each unlock a different depth. Pick the level you actually need.
Pick one. Try it on the next thing you write, decide, or build. You'll notice the difference within five minutes.
The cheat codes are free, fast, and most people will never use them. That's the whole point.