The Beginner's Guide to Writing Better Prompts

For the first month I used AI tools, I was frustrated. My prompts were vague and my results were generic. "Help me with my code" got me unhelpful walls of text. Then I learned a few simple patterns and everything changed. Here's what I wish someone had told me on day one.

Pattern 1: Be embarrassingly specific

This is the single biggest improvement you can make. Vague prompts get vague answers. Specific prompts get useful answers. Compare these:

I think of it like ordering food. "Give me something good" vs "I'd like a medium coffee, black, no sugar." The more specific you are, the less the AI has to guess — and the less it guesses wrong.

Pattern 2: Give context before your question

AI doesn't know anything about your situation unless you tell it. The more context you provide upfront, the better the response. I use a simple structure: who I am, what I'm working on, then what I need.

That last line is key — telling the AI how you want the answer delivered. "Explain step by step" or "keep it simple" or "give me just the code, no explanation" completely changes the output.

Pattern 3: Use tags to structure long prompts (especially for Claude)

I learned this one from Anthropic's official prompting guide, and it's a game-changer for complex requests. Wrap different parts of your prompt in XML-style tags. Claude is specifically trained to understand these, and ChatGPT handles them well too.

Tags help the AI distinguish between different types of information in your prompt. Without them, everything blurs together. With them, the AI knows exactly what's context, what's the task, and what the constraints are.

Pattern 4: Ask the AI to think step by step

For complex problems, add "Think step by step" or "Walk me through your reasoning" to your prompt. This makes the AI break the problem down instead of jumping straight to an answer — and the answers are usually much better.

Without "think step by step," the AI might give you a generic list. With it, it actually reasons through the problem — considers image sizes, render-blocking resources, JavaScript bundles — and gives you a prioritized, thoughtful answer.

Pattern 5: Show examples of what you want

This is called "few-shot prompting" and it's incredibly effective. Instead of describing what you want, show the AI an example of the output format you're looking for.

By giving one example, you've defined the exact format, tone, length, and style. The AI will match it precisely. This works for everything — code comments, data formats, writing styles, you name it.

The cheat sheet

Here's my mental checklist before I hit Enter on any prompt:

Prompting is a skill, and like any skill it gets better with practice. Don't overthink it — just start being more specific and you'll see immediate improvements.