Sharper Prompts

You asked for a product update and got a product update — three tidy paragraphs, when what you needed was five bullets to paste into Slack. The content was fine. The prompt was missing a part.

A prompt that lands has six parts, and you can assemble them on purpose: who the model should be (its role), what you want done (the task), what it needs to know (the context), the limits it has to respect (the constraints), the shape the reply comes back in (the output format), and one sample of what right looks like (the example). Most disappointing prompts have three or four of the six. The two that go missing are almost always the last two.

Constraints work in both directions, but not equally well. 'Do not mention pricing' does keep pricing out; a model can follow a prohibition. The trouble is that it says what the sentence must not contain and nothing about what should fill the space, so the model picks. 'Send them to the pricing page for numbers' does both jobs in one line.

And when a reply misses, change one part before you send it again. Rewrite the constraints and the format together and you have learned nothing about which of the two was actually wrong.