Playbook
The five-minute prompt craft checklist
A tight pre-flight before you ship a prompt to a teammate or to production.
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Use this checklist when a prompt matters: customer-facing copy, incident comms, roadmap narratives, or anything that will get forwarded.
Audience and stakes
- Name the reader role in one phrase.
- State what a bad output would break: trust, revenue, velocity, or compliance.
Inputs the model must respect
- Paste facts first, opinions second.
- Mark immovable constraints with “non-negotiable” so the model does not soften them.
Shape of the answer
- Pick a format: bullets, memo, table, or code blocks.
- Specify length bounds and tone bans, like no exclamation marks.
Verification pass
- Ask for an explicit assumptions section if data is incomplete.
- Request a self-check against your invariants before finalizing.
Archive habit
- Save the winning variant with two lines of context: audience and date.
That is it. Speed matters, but sloppy prompts tax everyone downstream.