The Vomit Prompt | Fred Deichler

I sat there for twenty minutes, staring at the blinking cursor, trying to get a decent result out of my AI assistant. I'm a Scrum Master. I'm used to facilitating complex conversations. But I was stuck on the input.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Type a prompt. Delete it. Refine a constraint. Type it again. Get distracted.

Painful.

We have access to the most powerful intelligence engines in history, capable of generating code and content in seconds. And we are talking to them through a straw. That's not a bottleneck. That's a tourniquet.

The keyboard isn't a tool. It's a filter.

I took typing in high school on an actual typewriter. I'm fairly proficient, 50-60 WPM without much trouble. But we think at 1,500 words per minute. The AI processes millions. Even as a fast typist, I am throttling the entire system down to the speed of my fingers.

The Bandwidth Problem

Speed isn't the issue. Context is. Way more than you'd think.

For exact answers to technical questions, brevity is fine. Shortest line between A and B. A regex pattern or Excel formula? Just type it.

But sometimes you don't know where you're going yet. You're exploring. Trying to find the shape of a new idea.

In those moments, you unconsciously shorten your input. Typing is physical labor. You leave out nuance and edge cases because you're optimizing for your wrists instead of clarity. You strip away the "why" and just provide the "what," hoping the AI can read your mind.

It usually can't. Frustrating.

A recent study showed voice typing reduces working memory burden by 40%. That's a staggering amount of brainpower wasted on mechanics instead of meaning. When you type, you format and formulate simultaneously. When you speak, you just formulate.

Think about it. When you're trying to articulate a complex observation, like why a team's energy drops every Tuesday at 2 PM, you don't just type "Tuesday low energy." You have a dozen small signals. The way the room goes silent. The body language of the Product Owner. The specific tension after standup.

AI models thrive on that context. They need the "ramble." The keyboard forces you into sparse, command-line mode that starves them of what they need to be smart.

The "Vomit Prompt" Protocol

I used to believe "prompt engineering" was a skill worth mastering. I was wrong (almost). I still engineer prompts in structured contexts. But this isn't about that.

This is about ideation. Exploration. Efficiency. Context. Sometimes just rambling until the shape of an idea emerges.

Today's models are smarter than your prompts. Getting too specific actually limits their ability to help. They're smart enough to fill in gaps, make connections, and offer angles you hadn't considered. When you over-constrain them with precise syntax, you're handcuffing that intelligence.

Stop trying to learn syntax for exploration. That's treating the symptom. Stop typing entirely.

I call this the "Vomit Prompt" protocol. Flood the AI with high-fidelity context using your highest-bandwidth output channel: your voice.

I'll admit, the first time I tried this, I felt ridiculous. I was alone in my office, rambling into my phone about a team dynamic I was trying to untangle. Even with no one watching, I kept glancing at the closed door. What if my wife walked by? What if my kids heard me talking to myself?

Which is absurd. They hear me on conference calls all the time. Or maybe they don't, and I just assume they tune it out. Either way, the self-consciousness was real.

But I stuck with it. The second time, with a little more structure in my rambling, it worked. The AI caught nuances I would have filtered out if I'd typed them. Worth it.

Here's how (and yes, you'll feel ridiculous at first):

Click the microphone icon. Most AI tools have excellent voice modes now. Use them.
Ramble. Don't try to be structured. Talk to the AI like it's a junior developer sitting next to you. Explain the goal, the constraints, what you tried yesterday that didn't work.
Take it on the road. I do this in my car. Voice recorder while driving, talking through a raw observation or difficult interaction, then NotebookLM analyzes the mess later.
Give it the firehose. You'll naturally include 3x more detail than if you typed. You'll share the "vibes" and "maybes" you would have skipped.
Compare the difference:
- Typed: "Create a retro agenda for a tired team."
- Spoken: "I need a retro agenda for a team that is just exhausted. They've had three hard sprints in a row, the Product Owner is pushing for more features, and I can tell half of them are mentally checked out. The senior dev hasn't spoken up in two sprints. The junior dev looks like she's about to quit. I don't want a standard 'Start/Stop/Continue' because they'll just roll their eyes and give me one-word answers. I need something that acknowledges the fatigue but helps us find one small win. Maybe a metaphor about refueling, or pit stops, or something that signals 'I see you're tired and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.' Oh, and there's a new stakeholder joining this one, so I need it to feel productive even if we're mostly just venting."
Let it structure the chaos. AIs are incredible at parsing messy instructions. Let it organize your thoughts.

From Writer to Editor

What if the bottleneck isn't the AI at all?

We're entering an era where "writing code" and "writing prose" are becoming "describing intent." We're moving from Writer to Editor.

The Writer starts with a blank page. The Editor starts with a draft. The Editor's job is higher leverage. Judgment. Taste. Direction.

You're no longer grinding for XP by mashing keys. You're the raid leader calling out the strategy.

If you describe intent with the richness of speech, you'll run laps around colleagues still pecking out // TODO comments. You provide the vision; the AI provides the labor. Your job is to curate, not generate every character.

The Churchill Method

You might think dictation is for casual notes, not "serious" writing.

The story of Winston Churchill, the man who led a war and wrote its history, is one where typing never entered the equation.

He published over 50 books and won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He didn't sit hunchbacked over a typewriter. He paced his study at Chartwell, dictating to secretaries, often from bed in the morning. He understood that the flow of ideas is distinct from the mechanics of capturing them.

Tell it to John Milton. He wrote Paradise Lost, over 10,000 lines of verse, entirely by dictation after going blind.

If Churchill could run a war and write a six-volume history without typing a word, you can diagnose a challenging observation without a keyboard.

Stop Typing. Start Speaking.

The goal isn't speed, though you will be faster. Even at 60 WPM, I'm 3x slower than my own speech.

That's a massive bottleneck.

When you remove the keyboard, prompts stop being queries and start being explorations. You stop optimizing for keystrokes. You start optimizing for thoughts.

That's the shift.

It is for this reason that I haven't typed a complex prompt in months. Try it for your next complex task. Don't type the prompt. Speak it.

Your hands can't keep up with the AI. Your voice can.

Pick up your phone. Talk to it. See what happens.

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