CELab - Ep 191 - Talk to it, don't prompt it - Part 1

Remember when getting good output from AI meant writing the perfect prompt? That era is over, and customer educators who still write formal, structured prompts are leaving their best thinking on the table. In this CELab "minisode", co-host Adam Avramescu sits down with Clea Mahoney, a learning experience designer and customer education leader who is always experimenting at the edge of AI. Together they do a live, unvarnished teardown of a real help article from Parta.io. Clea’s method is simple: turn on dictation, ramble, and let AI do the organizing.

Clea walks through the whole loop on screen. She dictates stream-of-consciousness feedback to an AI agent, has the AI run its own “blind” critique against instructional-design rules (cognitive load, multimedia that earns its place, active language), and then hands her brain dump to Claude with a short prompt that separates facts, guesses, and open questions. Adam adds the guardrails that keep it honest: define what good looks like before you ask AI for feedback, because taste is the one thing it can’t replace. He also shares a system-prompt line that makes Claude restate your goal before it answers. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, you can try this practice on your next content review. If you own customer-facing content in L&D, Enablement, Support, or Marketing, the workflow carries straight over.

Highlights from this episode:

• The “Yapper API.” Why talking to AI the way you’d onboard a colleague gets you richer feedback than typing ever will.
• Human vs. AI critique. What Clea found when she compared her ramble with the AI’s rubric-based review of the same article.
• One prompt, zero engineering. The four-line prompt that turns a brain dump into a prioritized change list, and why “don’t invent details” matters.
• Restate before you answer. Adam’s instruction that makes Claude confirm your goal and ask for missing context first.
• Taste is the job. Why constraints, judgment, and a clear picture of “good” stay human, and how AI gets you past the blank page.

Connect with Clea on LinkedIn, and stay tuned for Part 2, where she builds interactive walkthroughs in HTML. Prefer to watch? The full screen-share is on the CELab YouTube channel.