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Jim Christian - Signal Over Noise

Signal Over Noise: The PAST framework just got its own home

Published about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Dear Reader,

While I'm out this week with family, I don't have a new issue planned — but I do have a bit of news to share with you all: I’ve relaunched frameworkprompting.com.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll remember the PAST framework — Purpose, Audience, Scope, Tone — the four questions that fix a prompt before you hit enter. Framework Prompting is now a free, no-sign-up tool that walks you through those four questions right in your browser and hands you a finished prompt (Markdown for ChatGPT & Gemini, XML tags for Claude). Nothing is stored; your thinking stays yours.

A few things I’m proud of in this relaunch:

  • It’s a workbench, not a prompt library. The point isn’t to collect someone else’s prompts — it’s to learn to build your own.
  • Grounded in the official docs. Guidance is aligned with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s own prompting advice, and re-checked daily.
  • Open source, CC BY-SA — inspect it, adapt it, teach with it.
  • There’s even a sequel framework, SHAPE, for when a prompt works and you’re deciding whether to scale it.

→ Build your first prompt (it takes about a minute)

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And since we’re on the subject — five reads that still hold up

While I’m not writing a new issue, here are five pieces from the archive that are as true today as the day I wrote them. Start at the top — it’s where PAST began.

  1. ​Four Questions That Fix Your Prompts — the original PAST framework. This is the thinking the new tool is built on.
  2. ​How to Write AI Instructions That Actually Work — teach your AI to push back on you, not just do as it’s told.
  3. ​Writing With AI Isn’t Cheating — It’s an Accessibility Tool — a reframe worth forwarding.
  4. ​The System for Building Your AI Style Guide — the fix for “it sounds like AI.”
  5. ​The AI Capability Trap — why integration beats capability, every time.

Back next week with something new.

Until then,

Jim

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Jim Christian - Signal Over Noise

Deconstructing the tech hype

What I care about is helping people bring technology into their lives well — where it's genuinely needed, and where it can do the most good. Not tech for its own sake, not change to look modern. Sometimes that means AI; just as often it means something far simpler.The tech world is accelerating. This is my attempt to slow things down a little: to pick apart the hype and look for the reality and the truth in the messages — primarily around AI, and how it impacts us all.

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