You don't need a hundred operations prompts. You need five you trust and actually reuse.
Generate options, not answers
Write down what you never want as explicitly as what you do. The exclusions often do more work than the instructions.
- Ask for three angles, then cut to the one worth shipping
- Name the audience and the single goal before you generate
- Keep one ask per prompt — chaining beats cramming
Keep a negative list
Lock the parts that never change and leave one slot for the variable. Now every run shares a family resemblance instead of starting from scratch.
- Compare two outputs instead of trusting one
- Have the model flag what it could not cover
- Save the prompt that worked so the next person reuses it
Reuse the recipe
Write down what you never want as explicitly as what you do. The exclusions often do more work than the instructions.
- Compare two outputs instead of trusting one
- Keep one ask per prompt — chaining beats cramming
- Save the prompt that worked so the next person reuses it
Treat the first output as a draft, not a verdict. The prompt does the typing; you keep the judgment about what ships.