You typed a perfectly reasonable question into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — and what came back was a bland, meandering wall of text that could have been written by a bored textbook committee. Sound familiar? Here is the thing most people never realize: the AI did not fail you. Your prompt did. The gap between a disappointing AI response and a jaw-dropping one almost always comes down to a handful of avoidable mistakes — five of them, to be exact. Fix these five, and you will wonder why AI ever felt unreliable in the first place.