- A prompt is the instruction you give a model. The more precisely you describe the goal, the audience and what a good result looks like, the better the answer.
A prompt usually consists of several parts: a role or context, a task, input data, the expected format and a criterion for a good result. You need not use all of them, but the less you leave to the model’s guesswork, the fewer corrections you need. The documentation on writing prompts begins with a clear goal and context, not with linguistic tricks.
A common mistake
A prompt most often fails because its author does not know what they want. The sentence “write something about my company” has no success criterion. That is why it is worth starting from a five-sentence brief, as in the lesson Describe your project in five sentences, and only then building the instruction from it.
Where to read next
I write about the process of building a site from a brief in the article Your first AI-built site, and about checking how well prompts work in the text How to evaluate an agent. The whole topic: the Your first AI-built site hub.