← The AI Hype Audit — all 181 verdicts
PARTLY “35 CHATGPT CODES — powerful prompts, better answers” — they work; they're just not codes
The claim“35 CHATGPT CODES — Powerful prompts. Better answers.” — ELI5, TL;DR, SWOT, Act as [Role], Feynman, Socratic, Devil's Advocate, compare-in-a-table, JSON/Markdown output, and thirty more.
Every item on the card is a legitimate, working prompting pattern: ELI5, TL;DR, step-by-step, compare-in-a-table, pros/cons, SWOT, role prompting, the Feynman technique, Socratic questioning, devil's advocate, and output-format requests all genuinely steer any LLM — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — toward more useful answers. As a free cheat sheet for beginners, it's fine. The problem is the word “codes.” There is no hidden command layer — these are plain-English phrases the model understands the same way it understands any sentence. Nothing here is documented as a command or parameter anywhere in OpenAI's or Anthropic's docs, nothing is ChatGPT-specific, and nothing is secret. The framing trains beginners to think prompting is incantation instead of clear instruction — which is precisely the mental model that keeps people bad at prompting.
What holds up
- All 35 patterns genuinely work — formats, roles, and reasoning frames measurably improve output on any major LLM
- It's free with no comment-gate — just a shareable cheat sheet
- Nothing on the card is wrong, only mislabeled
What doesn't
- They are not “codes” — no OpenAI or Anthropic doc lists any of these as commands or parameters; they're ordinary sentences
- “Secret unlock” framing teaches incantation-thinking, the exact opposite of the real skill
- Nothing is exclusive, new, or ChatGPT-specific — the same phrases work identically in Claude or Gemini
The catch
Calling plain English “codes” manufactures scarcity around something that was never scarce — the model understands “explain this simply” because it understands English, not because you found a cheat key.
How to actually do it
- Compress all 35 into the one real skill: tell the model the audience, the format, and the reasoning style you want — “Explain X to a 10-year-old, then give me a pros/cons table”
- Keep three or four favorites in muscle memory (ELI5, table comparison, devil's advocate, output format) — that covers most daily use
- When a card promises secret codes, magic words, or hidden commands for an LLM, downgrade the source — it signals the author doesn't know how these models work
A perfectly good beginner cheat sheet mislabeled as a cheat code — use the patterns, unlearn the framing.
- Confidence
- High
- Posted by
- an AI-prompts page recycling prompting cheat sheets as infographics
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