How to Write Great Prompts: A Practical 6-Step Guide

A great prompt is a brief you'd give to a smart coworker. It contains intent, context, output format and tone. The 6 steps below will help you get consistently better results from the same model.

  1. 1. Assign a role

    Tell the AI how to think. "You are a senior SEO editor" or "You are an experienced primary school teacher." Role sets tone and decision thresholds.

  2. 2. Provide context

    Who it's for, which product/project, constraints and goal. Keep it to 2–3 sentences.

  3. 3. State the task in one sentence

    'Summarize the text below', 'Suggest 10 blog titles', 'Refactor this code'. Split multiple tasks into separate prompts.

  4. 4. Define the output format

    Bullets, table, JSON? How many words, how many examples, which sections? This alone lifts quality dramatically.

  5. 5. Show 1–2 examples (few-shot)

    AI learns your definition of 'good' from examples. Keep them short but representative.

  6. 6. List constraints and anti-goals

    'No clichés', 'Limit to 200 words', 'Do not fabricate sources'. Constraints make the prompt professional.

Use variable templates

Keep placeholders like {{topic}} in your prompt; use the 'Fill Variables' tool on this site to reuse for different content in one tap.

Let it critique itself

Ask the AI to critique its own output 'as a strict editor' and fix it in a second pass. Two passes in one prompt = 2x quality.

That's what we built this site for: stop reinventing the wheel. Browse prompts by category below, open one, adapt it to your case with 'Fill Variables', copy and use.