You are what you prompt

Philippe Beaudoin · May 3, 2026

Remember this old adage about being what you eat? I think it’s even more true for the prompts we use when we interact with AI.

Food gets into your body and changes it. Your prompts get into your head and remind you, everyday, of a specific way to interact using language.

And language is what we are to each other.

When someone shares a prompt, I imagine them repeatedly using these words in a conversation. I imagine how it would change them… Sometimes I wish we could look, together, at the person they would become in a year if they keep talking like that.

“Is that who you want to be?”, I’d like to ask.

And sure, talking to an LLM is not like talking to a human. But my experience is that the words I use tend to come back in other settings. I can compartmentalize to an extent but the more I do, the more fragmented I become… and I’d rather be whole.

My prompts are not prompts. They are long conversations laced with curiosity, laughter, wonder. If efficiency, for you, is minimizing the number of words required to complete the next step of a task, then my prompts are inefficient by design. But if you care about how words feel in your mouth, about how they change your way of being in the world, then you may want to give “my way” a try…

And, interestingly enough, I find that it has helped me understand WTF is going on with AI more than any overly-optimistic or overly-pessimistic post on LinkedIN.

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