← Community

Tighten A Prompt

Diagnose why a prompt underperforms and fix the cause — usually ambiguity, buried instructions, or missing examples — rather than adding more words. Use when a prompt gives inconsistent output or ignores instructions.

---
name: tighten-a-prompt
category: ai-agents
description: >-
  Diagnose why a prompt underperforms and fix the cause — usually ambiguity,
  buried instructions, or missing examples — rather than adding more words. Use
  when a prompt gives inconsistent output or ignores instructions.
---

# Tighten a Prompt

The instinct when a prompt misbehaves is to add a sentence. Do that ten times and
you have a long prompt with contradictions in it, which behaves *worse* and is
now too tangled to debug.

Diagnose first. Most failures are one of four things.

## 1. The instruction is ambiguous

If two competent people would produce different outputs from your prompt, the
model is not wrong — the prompt is underspecified.

> "Summarise this document."

Summarise for whom, in how many words, keeping what? Compare:

> "Summarise this in 3 bullets for someone deciding whether to read it. Lead
> with the conclusion. Skip methodology."

**Test:** hand your prompt to a colleague with no context. If they ask a
clarifying question, that question is your missing constraint.

Shared publicly by the author and open for any use. See the Terms.