Prompting That Actually Works

Stop guessing at magic words. Clear instructions, the right context, and a few reliable patterns get better results than any secret prompt.

1. Say What You Actually Want The biggest gains come from clarity, not cleverness - spell out your goal, the context, the constraints, and the format you want back.
2. Patterns That Help A handful of reliable moves - assign a role, ask for steps, show an example, pin the output format, and let it think first - that lift answer quality across almost any task.
3. Iterate, Do Not One-Shot Treat the AI as a conversation you steer - refine, correct, and give feedback - and learn the moment when starting a fresh chat beats fighting a tangled one.