Prompting - Best Practices
These are practical, high-impact tips to make your prompting sharper, more efficient, and more future-proof. Each point calls out a common blind spot and gives you an actionable step you can apply immediately. They come from hands-on use across multiple models — not theory — so you can avoid wasted time, confusion, and frustration. Save this list, revisit it, and watch your results improve over time. - Break prompts into reusable modules when they're quite big: short, focused blocks you can swap or rearrange without rewriting everything. - Use flexible wording, avoid model-specific quirks, and test prompts on multiple models while keeping a fallback version. - Explore prompts that instruct the AI to improve or analyze other prompts, building a meta-level skill set. - Record the model version in your notes and maintain a versioned prompt library for each model. - Review at least the sections on prompt formatting, capabilities, and limitations to uncover hidden features. - Decide the exact format you want (table, markdown, JSON) before prompting to ensure clean, reusable results. - Refine in steps, asking the AI to improve its own output until it meets your target standard. - Split large tasks into separate threads or requests to keep each focused and avoid token overload. - Skim the docs to learn about functions, system prompts, and structured outputs — even if you don’t code. - Complete at least one learning path to gain tested best practices straight from OpenAI. - Search for prompts and solutions others have shared to shortcut your own problem-solving. - When asking for edits or improvements, also request an explanation in a table showing why, what, and how. - Turn specific answers into generalized templates or frameworks so they work in multiple contexts. - Run edge cases, tricky inputs, and unusual instructions to discover weaknesses early. - Add “Explain your reasoning step-by-step” to spot logic gaps and strengthen your results. Bonus Tip: