After shipping a lot of AI features, the pattern that separated reliable prompts from flaky ones was simple: every reliable prompt names a role, one task, its constraints, and the exact output format. A specific prompt on a cheap model consistently beat a vague prompt on an expensive one.
Full write-up with examples (classification, extraction, chain-of-thought, structured JSON): https://www.aiappsapi.com/articles/prompt-engineering.php
source & further reading
dev.to — original article
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