How to Write Effective AI Prompts
A great AI prompt is the difference between a generic output and a result that saves you hours. The most effective prompts share five characteristics: they are specific about the desired output, they provide context about purpose and audience, they specify a format (bullet list, essay, table, code), they include constraints (length, tone, reading level), and they provide an example where possible.
The single biggest improvement most people make is adding a role: "You are a senior software engineer reviewing code for a junior developer" or "You are a marketing copywriter writing for a health-conscious Indian audience aged 25–40, factoring in regional e-commerce preferences, price sensitivity in Tier-2 cities, and festive season buying patterns." Role prompting shifts the model's output register, vocabulary, and depth in ways that dramatically improve usefulness.
Prompting Tips by AI Model
ChatGPT (GPT-4o): Responds well to structured prompts with numbered steps. Use markdown formatting requests explicitly. Works best when you break complex tasks into a series of smaller prompts rather than one large instruction block.
Claude (Anthropic): Excels with long-context tasks and nuanced instructions. Provide full context upfront — who you are, what you're building, and why. Claude's 200k token context window makes it ideal for analysing long documents, large codebases, or maintaining consistency across extended pieces of writing.
Gemini (Google): Benefits from prompts that reference its web search capability — "search for the latest data on X and summarise with sources." For creative tasks, style references work well: "write in the style of a BBC technology journalist" outperforms generic tone instructions.
Midjourney: Image prompts work best with descriptive visual language — lighting, camera angle, art style, colour palette, mood. The format "subject, setting, style, lighting, camera" consistently outperforms natural language descriptions. Use negative prompts (--no blur, --no text) to exclude unwanted elements from generations.