The four parts of a prompt you can actually trust A developer identified a reliable prompt pattern after shipping many AI features: every trustworthy prompt includes a role, a task, constraints, and an exact output format. A specific prompt on a cheap model consistently outperformed a vague prompt on an expensive one. 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 https://www.aiappsapi.com/articles/prompt-engineering.php