Prompt Engineering

Put what's in your head into words

The same request can turn out very differently depending on how it's phrased. Just ask for a piece of writing, and the length and tone both get guessed at. Whatever isn't written gets filled in with whatever's most common.

If there's something specific in mind, spelling out each condition helps. What's it about, what format should it come back in, who's going to read it, roughly how long — laying these out cuts down on wasted rounds. Write meeting notes as a five-line list, written so a first-time reader gets it, with no jargon, and that's the kind of specificity that pays off.

What to leave out can be written down too. But rather than piling on a list of don'ts, describing the shape that's actually wanted tends to work better. For picture generation, some services even have a separate field set aside just for what shouldn't appear.

Showing an example speeds things up

Attaching one or two finished examples is often faster than explaining the format at length. Show the exact shape of the answer you want and it picks up on tone and line breaks that would be hard to describe in words.

Two or three examples are usually enough. But if the examples don't match each other in format, that causes more confusion than it solves. Keep them in the same mold, and write them at the same level of polish as the answer actually wanted.

Make room for it to think

For problems that involve calculation or juggling several conditions, asking for just the answer tends to go wrong. Ask it to work through the reasoning step by step before giving the answer, and accuracy climbs noticeably. Writing out the middle steps lets it refer back to its own earlier reasoning along the way.

If the middle steps look messy, it's fine to ask for the reasoning first and a clean summary at the end. Plenty of services reason things through on their own without being asked these days, but for complicated conditions, spelling it out explicitly still helps.

It doesn't land in one try

Getting the wanted result on the first try is rare. Pointing out exactly what's off and asking for a fix goes much faster than starting over from scratch. Building on the earlier exchange usually beats rewriting from the top.

If the instruction has gotten long, look for something to cut. Instructions that pull in different directions mean neither one gets followed properly. Rather than adding more sentences, putting the core point up front and trimming the clutter tends to help more.

A good instruction gets reused

Once an instruction works well, save it and reuse it. Leave the parts that change blank and lock everything else in place, and the result comes back at the same quality every time. Services built for a team often bake an instruction like this in ahead of time and take only the user's question from there.

Worth keeping in mind: whatever gets pasted into an instruction can end up leaving the system, so it's safer not to include someone else's personal information or a company's confidential material. And no matter how carefully an instruction is worded, it doesn't verify facts on its own — whatever facts show up in the result still need a separate check.