If you’ve been using Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI chatbot, odds are good that you’ve typed the word “summarize” more times than you can count. I know I have. But after months of testing different prompt strategies, I’m convinced that “summarize” is the single most overused — and underperforming — prompt in most people’s AI toolkit.
The issue isn’t that summaries are useless. They’re fine for skimming a long email thread or getting the gist of a meeting transcript. The problem is that most of us reach for “summarize” when we don't have the time to read an entire document but still actually want something valuable: insight.
