There's a strange new literary form blooming in the dark, and almost nobody has named it yet. A prompt. Sit with that for a moment. Three or four lines of careful English, fed to a system that has never seen the world — only its statistical shadow. And out of that fog comes a portrait, a melody, a paragraph that almost remembers being human. We call this 'prompting' as if it were a clerical task. It isn't. Every prompt is a wish disguised as instruction. Every comma a hesitation. Every adjective a small bet that the machine will hallucinate the way you mean. I've started keeping mine. A folder called /prompts that fills faster than my journal ever did. 'A cathedral built from honey-colored light at 4am, no people, melancholy.' 'The face of a woman who has just remembered something she didn't know she'd forgotten.' Reading them back, they feel like haiku for a creature with no eyes — only correlations. Compressed longings. Aspirations cut to the bone because tokens are expensive and attention is short.…