Stop paying the Prompt Tax

Hello! 👋 

It’s Thursday, 28^th August 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts, my weekly note on the future of work and living. One idea each week, built for leaders and makers. Today’s idea is a cost line you do not see yet feel every hour.

You open the tool to save time. You spend the next ten minutes telling it what you mean. Shorter. Clearer. With context. With examples. With guardrails. You try again. You fix the output. You try again. The work you came for still sits untouched.

That is the Prompt Tax. It does not show in your budget. It shows in your brain. You pay it with attention, with language, with the small willpower you need for the real work.

The new mental load

We once blamed email. Then chat. Then meetings stacked to the ceiling. Now the load is quieter. You are writing for a machine that speaks everyone’s language and nobody’s. You translate your intent into a syntax it accepts. You become an interpreter of yourself.

Prompts force decisions you never had to surface with a teammate at your side. Voice. Scope. Edge cases. Risk tolerance. Sources of truth. You make these calls for a report, a pitch, a job ad, a contract summary, a script, a memo. Valuable, yes. But often not the thing itself.

Craft moved one step away. You manage the conversation that makes the craft.

What the tax steals

It steals depth. When the fastest path is “ask again” then you trade hard thinking for iterative requesting. You skim five ideas instead of cutting one to the bone.

It steals voice. Models love safe patterns. They smooth your edges until you sound like everyone else. Clean. Correct. Forgettable.

It steals time twice. First while you hunt for magic phrasing. Then later when you fix the subtle errors a better brief would have prevented.

Why this keeps happening

Most AI tools worship flexibility. “Say anything”. That is generous and lazy at once. It moves the structure work to you. You carry it as decision fatigue.

Great software narrows the path. It reduces entropy. It learns your defaults. It brings the right context to the point of work. Most tools still make you haul context across tabs.

The hidden bill inside teams

Every product review, hiring loop, compliance check, and planning doc now has a silent pre‑step. Someone somewhere is crafting inputs for a system. Multiply that across a company and you get a second shift no one budgets for. Margins leak in keystrokes.

Leaders think they are buying automation. They are buying a language switch. Your best people now spend prime hours translating the business into prompts. Translation has value. It should not be the job.

How to lower the Prompt Tax

Own the language. The business, not each individual, should define how you ask machines for work. Build a living grammar, not a pile of templates. Names. Edge cases. Quality bars. Red lines. Keep it in the tools, not a wiki nobody opens.

Move context to the system. Connect source of truth to the request. Let the model see canonical data, not whatever someone pasted last Tuesday.

Use forms when the output has a shape. Free text is perfect for exploration. It is poor for repeatable work. If the output has a template, the input should too. Questions become fields. Fields become defaults. Defaults become speed.

Reduce decisions. If a choice repeats, set a default. Review defaults monthly. Change them when the work changes. Stability beats cleverness.

Speak, then shape. Capture intent fast in voice. Turn it into structure. Edit the structure. Save the structure. Your first draft becomes your playbook getting better.

Pair humans on clarity. A short loop between the requester and the worker still beats a long loop with a model that never gets tired of being vague.

Track the bill. Count prompt iterations on critical flows for a month. Spikes expose missing context, fuzzy standards, or tools that do not fit your work.

What changes when you pay attention

Days feel lighter. Drafts arrive in the right shape. Reviews move faster because the bar is visible. New hires ramp in days because the grammar teaches them how the team thinks.

The work recovers its weight. People wrestle with the real problem again. Analysis, judgment, taste. Fewer takes. More truth.

Most of all, you stop outsourcing your voice. Machines support it. They do not flatten it.

So, what?

Treat LLMs as infrastructure. Fund it. Maintain it. Assign an owner. The people and companies that win will build an internal language the machine understands without friction. It will sit inside their tools like plumbing. Quiet. Reliable. Invisible until it is not.

If you run a team, do one thing. Lower the Prompt Tax every quarter. Make it cheaper to be clear than to be clever. Make the easy path the path to good work.

Talking to machines is not the future of work. Doing the work is. The meter does not get to run your day. Thank you for reading!

Best,
Kartik

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Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

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