"Stop."
I said it to the AI assistant I was using to design a card for a maker's stall. I could see the card in my head and I could not get it out through a prompt. Every version came back nearly right, and nearly right was not moving.
So I asked it to stop designing and start asking. One question at a time. Who gets the card. Where it lives. What a scan leads to. Flat or folded. How it comes off the poster. Where a question was easier shown than said, it drew the choices and I picked, corrected, or scrapped.
Some of its drawings failed on geometry: a tent shape that was not a bag, a logo upside down, a slit narrower than the tab meant to go through it. Each time, one more question fixed it.
We ended with a tent card whose base flaps lock into each other. It does what I asked better than anything I had managed to prompt.
The design I had prompted for at the start was right. It would have worked. Getting it finished that way would have taken a lot more effort and fiddling, because I could not put what I wanted into a prompt. Answering questions turned out to be easier than asking for what I wanted.
Nothing is printed yet, and why anyone would scan the card is still an open question. That is next.
When did you know exactly what you wanted and still fail to prompt it?
Hey, let's be careful out there.