Prompt Power Weekly: Top Tips from the LLM Frontier

Turn messy prompts into crisp, decision-ready answers.

This week’s scan distilled a familiar truth with fresh rigour: simple, explicit prompts still win—especially when paired with a few advanced moves. I stress-tested the patterns below across summarization, analysis, and decision-support tasks and observed cleaner structure, fewer revisions, and more “ready‑to‑ship” drafts.

The big levers: set the role, lock the format, give one or two gold‑standard examples—then add reasoning and self‑correction only where it pays. Here are the prompts I’m keeping in my active kit.

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Top Tips This Week

1) Pin the Role, Audience, Format, Constraints (RAFC) up front

Summary (source & date): Both OpenAI and Anthropic emphasize specificity—explicitly stating the task, audience, output format, and guardrails. Clarity on structure and examples measurably improves adherence. (OpenAI Prompt Engineering, docs accessed Nov 14, 2025; Anthropic “Prompting best practices,” docs accessed Nov 14, 2025.)

Copy‑paste prompt:

You are a {ROLE}.

Audience: {AUDIENCE}
Goal: {TASK}

Output format:
- {SECTION 1}
- {SECTION 2}
- {SECTION 3}

Constraints:
- Max {N} words
- {TONE/STYLE} (e.g., concise, evidence-led)
- Cite sources if you use facts.

Context:
{PASTE KEY FACTS / INPUTS}

Produce only the sections above—no preamble or afterword.

Personal insight: When I open with RAFC, the model snaps to the brief and I spend less time deleting throat‑clearing or reformatting.