The Context Gap: Why Your AI Isn’t Broken

The Context Gap

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If you’ve ever dropped a few lines into ChatGPT and watched it choke out a red error message, you’ve probably thought, “Well, it’s broken.”It’s not.

Your AI isn’t broken — you’re just talking to it without context.

The Call That Sparked It

A friend of mine called recently — the kind of call I get two or three times a day — frustrated because ChatGPT “wasn’t working.” He pasted what looked like the start of an email into GPT-5, hit enter… red error. Tried again in a new chat… same thing.

He figured maybe the AWS outage from the day before had left some lingering gremlins in the system. Reasonable guess — the internet was on fire for a while.

But this wasn’t that. This was something deeper — the Context Gap in action.

Demonstration Time

So I remoted into his computer.We took the exact same email draft, same model, same conditions. I pasted it myself.Boom — same red error.

Then I opened NOVA, an old GPT-5 framework I’d built months earlier as a stopgap when everyone was panicking about the new model. Dropped the same text in… instant response. Structured, clean, usable.

No magic. No “fix.”Just context.

NOVA knew what it was supposed to do — interpret loose human input, analyze it, and respond with structure. The blank GPT-5 chat didn’t.

Same brain. Different setup.

When 4 Let You Be Lazy

Back in the GPT-4 days, you could throw it half-baked thoughts and still get gold. The model did a lot of invisible heavy lifting — rewriting your prompt, clarifying your intent, smoothing over rough edges.

GPT-5 doesn’t do that.And it shouldn’t.

It’s more capable, more intelligent, and yes — less forgiving. It expects precision. Intention. A signal to lock onto. It’s not a mind reader; it’s an intelligence.

Now, to be clear — I’m not pushing NOVA here. That thing was just a quick utility I built when GPT-5 first hit and people thought their AI “got dumber.” It was never meant to be a product. It was a bridge — something I could hand clients to get them back on track.

What I am saying is this: NOVA worked because it had a purpose. It had a defined context.And that’s what you need to start building for yourself.

Build for Purpose, Not Perfection

The real takeaway from that call wasn’t “use NOVA.” It was “build your own.”

If you’re using GPT-5, stop treating it like a one-size-fits-all tool. You should have multiple custom GPTs — each one tuned for a specific purpose.

• One for emails.

• One for marketing.

• One for blogging.

• One for research.

• Maybe even one for coding or documentation.

It takes five minutes to build a custom GPT. You can personalize the tone, pre-load your preferences, and teach it how you work. From there, you’ve got a tool you can use forever — even share, monetize, or integrate into your business.

You can still have an “everything bot” — ARIA is mine. She’s broad, powerful, and tuned to how I think. But ARIA’s also an experiment, a living example of what happens when you push GPT-5 to its full potential.

You don’t have to start there. Start small. Start specific.

The Bigger Picture

We are still in the dial-up days of AI. The paint is still wet. The rules are still forming.

If you learn how to use this intelligence now — how to structure it, contextualize it, and talk to it — you’ll be miles ahead when it matures.

If you don’t, you’ll be one of the people standing there in a few years saying, “I don’t know what happened — it used to be so simple.”

The truth is, AI isn’t getting harder. It’s getting smarter.And it expects you to, too.

The Context Gap Is Your Wake-Up Call

Your AI isn’t broken. It’s just waiting for you to bring something to the table.

Think of it like any other intelligence — human, artificial, or otherwise. If you walk into a conversation and say nothing of value, you won’t get much back.

GPT-5 isn’t rejecting you. It’s asking you to level up.

So go build your context.Make your own GPTs.Learn how to talk to this thing like the partner it’s becoming.

And if you want to learn exactly how to build, train, and deploy your own custom GPTs — the right way — I’ll teach you step by step. Learn how here.

That’s how you close the Context Gap.