The AI brief: describing a product so you get what you meant

"Make a nice website for my business" is a recipe for disappointment: the AI will build something average. Compare that with the brief below.

The brief formula: 5 blocks

1. Product and user. "A yoga studio for beginners aged 30–45 who feel self-conscious in group classes."
2. Pages. "Home, schedule, teachers, prices, contact."
3. The key action. "Book a trial class — form: name, phone, preferred time."
4. Style. "Calm and warm: cream background, sage-green accents, large soft typography, lots of breathing room." Or a reference: "in the spirit of Calm and Headspace."
5. Success criterion. "A visitor gets that it's yoga for beginners within 10 seconds and sees the booking button without scrolling."

Ways to sharpen it

• References: "header like linear.app, pricing table like notion" — the AI knows the famous sites.
• Anti-examples: "no stock photos of people in suits, no purple gradients."
• Real content: give it your actual copy and prices — a site full of placeholder text always looks worse.

A whole brief, worked through

Let's put those five blocks into one message — exactly as you'll send it to the tool in the next module, in a single go:

Product: "Warm Floor", a yoga studio for beginners aged 30–45
  who feel awkward in group classes and worry they can't keep up.
Pages: home, schedule, teachers, prices, contact.
Key action: book a trial class for €1.
  Form: name, phone, preferred day of the week.
Style: calm and warm — cream background, sage-green accent,
  large soft typography, lots of breathing room.
  In the spirit of Calm and Headspace. No stock people in suits.
Success criterion: within 10 seconds it's clear this is yoga for
  beginners, and the booking button is visible without scrolling.

Notice: not a word about technology — only the product, the people and the result.

Myths beginners fall for

• "The longer the prompt, the better." No — the more structured, the better. Five clear blocks beat a page of rambling. The AI loses the thread in a wall of text just like a person does.
• "The AI already knows what I want." It knows thousands of sites, but it doesn't read minds. Don't name the accent colour and you get default blue. Don't name the user and you get a "site for everyone", which is a site for no one.
• "References are copying." A reference is a language. "Header like linear.app" is faster and more precise than three paragraphs about "minimal but alive". It's exactly how real designers talk in a client briefing.

A classic mistake, unpacked

A beginner writes: "Build a modern online store that sells." The AI returns a generic template, the person is let down and concludes "this tool is weak". The brief was weak: no product, no buyer, no key action, no style. The rule is simple: every "nice", "modern", "easy to use" is a flag that something concrete is missing. Swap the opinion for a checkable fact: not "easy to use", but "check out in three clicks with no account".

A Socratic pause

Think about it: why does "in the spirit of Calm" work better than "make it calm and expensive-looking"? Put your answer into words before reading on. The hint is in one word — checkable. Calm exists; you can open it and compare. "Expensive" means something different to everyone.

What NOT to do

Don't describe technology ("build it in React with Postgres") — the tool picks the stack. Your zone is what and for whom; its zone is how. In the next module we'll take this exact yoga-studio brief and build a real landing page from it in Lovable — so the stronger your brief now, the fewer edits later.

Anti-examples: the underrated move

Saying what you don't want is sometimes more useful than describing what you do. The AI has favourite clichés it drifts toward by default: stock photos of smiling people in suits, purple gradients, three identical icon columns. One line — "no stock people, no purple gradients, no three-column grid" — instantly pulls the site out of "typical AI template" territory. Think of it as a fence: you're not only pointing where to go, you're closing off the dead ends the model wanders into on its own.

Do this now

Take any idea of yours — even a fuzzy one — and write it out in five blocks right in your notes: product and user, pages, key action, style with a reference, success criterion. Add a line of anti-examples. A couple of lessons from now you'll paste this text into Lovable and watch it turn into a real site.