A prompt is every word you send to an AI. The model has no memory of you, no intuition about your situation, and cannot read between the lines. It generates the most statistically useful continuation of exactly what you wrote.
Quality in = quality out. Learning to write better prompts is the single highest-leverage skill in AI — and it costs nothing.
Write a professional email from me (a software engineer at a 40-person startup) to my manager, Priya Sharma, requesting 5 days off: December 23–27 for the holidays.
Context:
Requirements:
I need a weeknight chicken dinner for 2 people.
What I have: chicken thighs (bone-in), garlic, lemon, fresh rosemary, olive oil, canned white beans, chicken stock, parmesan.
Constraints:
Format: one intro sentence (what the dish is), then ingredient list with amounts, then numbered steps. Add a note if anything can be prepped the night before.
Claude handles natural conversational prompts well, but explicit constraints always outperform implied ones. Direct and specific gets better results than polite and vague.