Day: February 18, 2026

A really good AI prompt to help you get the most out of AI

If you do anything with AI, then knowing how to write a good prompt is essential. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing complex vibe coding or merely sending a question to ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Microsoft CoPilot, the prompt you use is the key to getting good responses.

Recently I was happy to come across this post on swiss-miss.com on the perfect AI prompt. I took the liberty of copying it below so I could add my own comments in parentheses. A good/perfect AI prompt should have:

  1. Goal – Define what you want clearly. (Use action oriented verbs and imperative sentences when you send a prompt to AI systems. Limit your goal to one thing. If you want several things, specify it in such a way that it seems unified. Or ask for one thing, and then put more details in the context dump).
  2. Return Format – Specify exactly how you want the response structured. (Do you want your output in list form, ask for it. But be creative and expansive. Do you want it in PDF format? Or an XLSX file or a CSV file? Maybe you need a markdown file or a Word document? Then ask. Also specify length, like “provide a one page markdown document” or “produce a list of 10 items”).
  3. Warnings – Highlight any important details the AI should double-check (e.g. if you are asking for resources, specify you don’t want out of date resources)
  4. Context Dump – Provide background info to improve the response (this is a good one. The more additional information you can provide, the more likely the AI system will provide the answer you want. Warnings and the context dump help frame things for the AI system. Never assume it knows what you know or that it even remembers what you asked it just recently.)

Prompt specs will continue to change as generative AI systems change. For now, this is a good guide to get better results from your AI queries. You can still specify the role you want the AI to take on, though I see people doing less of that. Regardless, detail is important in your query.

P.S. Thank to the blog swiss-miss.com for this. You need to go there: it has decades of goodness you should know about.