There is a lot of talk right now about “Prompt Engineering” as if it is some mystic, arcane art that will make you a millionaire. It won’t. Anyone trying to sell you a $99 PDF course on “ChatGPT Secrets” is just a modern-day snake oil salesman.
But while AI is a terrible writer, it can be an incredibly powerful defensive tool. It won’t write the next great American novel, but it can save you from reading corporate garbage.
I don’t use AI to write for me anymore. But I absolutely use it as a highly aggressive filter for the rest of the internet. We are currently drowning in the “Slop Economy”—an endless ocean of LinkedIn hustle-bro posts, bloated tech press releases, and zero-calorie emails filled with words like synergy, delve, and agile paradigms.
If someone sends me a 1,000-word press release, I don’t read it. I run it through the Slop Squeegee.
The Prompt
If you want to reclaim your time, copy this text, paste it into your local model or chat window of choice, and drop the offending article underneath it:
System Prompt: You are a deeply cynical, exhausted editor. Read the following text. Strip away the PR anesthesia, the fluff, and the hype. Reduce it to the single, brutal truth the author actually meant. If the text contains no actual substance or is purely buzzwords, return the exact word “NULL”.
Watch 15 paragraphs of corporate spin instantly evaporate.
The Squeegee in Action
If you think this is a gimmick, here is exactly what this prompt does to standard internet garbage.
Target 1: The Tech Layoff Email
- The Slop: “Today, we are announcing a strategic right-sizing of our organizational structure. In order to better align with our long-term agile paradigms and pivot towards emerging AI market sectors, we are making the difficult decision to reduce our global headcount by 12%. We are incredibly grateful for the synergies…”
- The Squeegee Output: “We fired 500 people to make the quarterly spreadsheet look better for the shareholders.”
Target 2: The LinkedIn Hustle Post
- The Slop: “I woke up at 4:00 AM today. Most people are sleeping. I am building. If you aren’t leveraging LLMs to 10x your B2B SaaS funnel in today’s fast-paced digital landscape, you are already falling behind. Here are 5 ways I delve into my grindset…”
- The Squeegee Output: “NULL.”
Target 3: The Video Game “Apology” Tweet
- The Slop: “We hear you. Launching a game is incredibly complex, and our vision for a persistent online universe didn’t meet the high standards of our passionate community. We are committed to an ongoing journey of listening, learning, and delivering a roadmap of robust updates…”
- The Squeegee Output: “We knew the game was broken, but we shipped it anyway to hit our fiscal quarter deadline. We will abandon it in six months.”
Defend Your Attention
In the modern internet, functionality is the baseline, but attention is the currency. Every time you read a bloated email or a padded article, someone is stealing your time.
Stop using AI to generate more slop for other people to read. Start using it as a shield to protect your own mental bandwidth. You’re welcome.
