Two words at the right moment gets you further than a paragraph of instruction. You have already spent 20 minutes explaining the situation, uploading the files and correcting the first attempt, so what the model needs from you now is direction. Direction takes two words once you know which two. You can keep it simple, even if ChatGPT is not.

Allie K. Miller posted her list of the 18 two-word prompts she types most. Miller was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in AI. She was global head of machine learning for startups and venture capital at AWS, where she built the division to around 100 people, and she launched IBM’s first multimodal AI team. Miller now advises Fortune 500 companies and AI labs including Salesforce, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, and over 2 million followers make her the most followed voice on AI in business.

I founded Coachvox in 2023 to help coaches and consultants leverage AI. The people who get the least out of AI treat every message as a fresh request, explaining themselves from the start every time. Two-word prompts work for the opposite reason. Here are Miller’s 18, grouped into the 5 categories where they give you your time back.

The two-word ChatGPT prompts that stop you wasting time with AI

Three of the prompts begin something. “do this” goes with a screenshot, so a tweet Miller wants implemented gets sent to Claude Code or Codex with nothing typed underneath it. “plz fix” goes with a screenshot of a bug, an error or a DM reporting one. “now what” comes at the end of a project, when the push is finished and there is still energy in the tank.

Screenshots do the explaining for you. A picture of the thing you want built creates a better outcome than writing a paragraph about it. The two words tell the model which job it is looking at. Save “now what” for the hour after a launch. It puts the model through its paces on the thing you just finished, and comes back with the action to take next.

Understand what comes back

“ELII” and “ELIE” is Miller’s shorthand for “explain it to me like I am an intern”, then “explain it to me like I am an executive”. “da fuq?” goes in when a model returns five paragraphs of dense information and she is more lost than when she started. “first principles?” resets the assumptions, for the answer that is factually right.

Asking for both versions of an explanation gives you the detail and the summary in one reply, instead of the two messages it takes. The reset prompt is for a different problem. When a draft is correct and lifeless, the thinking started too far downstream, and going back to the question underneath fixes that.

“interview me” gets the model asking questions until it has the context you did not think to give it. “challenge me” asks for a sparring partner. “show receipts” demands sources, evidence and reasoning, where bad sources fail and good ones are not an automatic pass. “find leverage” asks for the small moves that create outsized outcomes, for the days when optimizing every small thing is not available to you.

The benefit of ChatGPT is the back and forth, so use it that way. You are whiteboarding with a friend who has read everything. Ask it to interview you before you ask it to produce anything, then argue with what comes back and make it show you where the claim came from. Your answer improves every time.

“spawn agents” goes in when the quantity is large, a spreadsheet of hundreds of rows or a list of tasks that would take a week in sequence. “automate this” turns a conversation you have had once into a repeatable pattern, and “codify this” and “schedule this” do the same job. “hey simon” calls Miller’s AI chief of staff, who coordinates the other 33 agents she works with.

This is the one people get most wrong. AI programs get used one prompt at a time, by people who would never work that way with a team. Parallel is available to you. When the job is big, ask for agents instead of answers, and when you notice you will do this task 50 more times, say so before you close the chat.

“forecast impact” plays out the downstream consequences of a decision, legal, PR, economic, political and internal. “remember this” pushes a correction or a piece of context into memory, which happens automatically sometimes and not always. “keep going!” is encouragement, alongside “have fun” and “I trust you”. “girl bye” is for the moment, in Miller’s words, “when AI loses its mind”.

“girl bye” is for when the AI is not responding and the two of you are not working well together. You get frustrated, and another 20 minutes of typing makes both of you worse. Shut the laptop. Go outside, get some air, and come back when you are both fresh. The thread you walk away from gets solved in minutes the next morning.

Use these two-word ChatGPT prompts and stop wasting time with AI

18 prompts, and every one of them is two words long. The skill is knowing which moment you are in, whether what you need is context pulled out of you, an argument, a forecast or a walk around the block. Pick three and use them this week. The rest become habits once you notice how much of your day goes on explaining things you already explained.

Go from unknown expert to in-demand. Get the five game-changing prompts, free .