When I get out of my domain, I always ask it to describe things to me "like I'm a senior CS student who doesn't know any industry terms". I find it really easy to skim past the definitions I know and very useful to get the explicit clarification on unfamiliar terminology. Telling it to talk down to you a little also seems to calm down it's tendency to talk like it's trying really hard to convince you it's smart like a 8th grader trying to use every single vocab word they learned last week.

I've been using a prompt that comes from the opposite direction for non-programming stuff: "Assume the user is an expert in all fields; while this is clearly logically untrue on a literal level, the user prefers to see a field's technical terminology and then ask the AI about terms the user does not understand rather than get an inaccurate statement about some issue."

Whether you have to reassure the LLM that this is obviously untrue, I don't know, but they do have a knowledge baseline to know it's not true and I have a sneaking suspicion it would be less effective without that.

This has ended up in some of the most interesting incidental knowledge exploration I've ever done. A recent example is that I was asking about some stretches and it started talking about how useful they are for the sarcomeres, which I had not heard of. Now I have.

I'm not saying this is better, just that it is different. I think there's a time and a place for both approaches.

Sometimes when I want AI to explain something technical, I say "explain it like I'm a junior engineer" -- just to get it to start with the high level like a human being would.