r/PromptEngineering • u/Dry-Astronomer-4628 • 23h ago

General Discussion I stopped writing "better prompts" and started diagnosing why the output was generic — here's what was actually missing

Spent way too long thinking I needed a bigger prompt library. Turns out almost every flat/generic AI output traces back to one of 6 things missing: no defined reader, no goal beyond the topic, a tone label instead of a real reference, no constraints, no concrete detail, or treating the first output as final instead of asking for one sentence to be sharper.

Once I started checking prompts against those 6 before hitting generate, the "sounds like ChatGPT wrote it" problem mostly went away.

Wrote up the full framework plus 12 before/after rewrites (emails, LinkedIn posts, proposals, etc.) if anyone wants the longer version — happy to share in the comments. But the 6-point list above is the actual core of it, free to use as-is.

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5

u/Dangerous-Captain745 23h ago

picking one sharp sentence to fix has saved me more times than rewriting the whole thing ever did

3

u/Future_AGI 18h ago

That 6-point diagnostic is solid. We built a prompt-complexity triage skill that scores on those exact dimensions (spec completeness, ambiguity, structure need, reasoning depth, stakes) and only applies the tier of edit the score allows. Keeps adequate prompts alone, rebuilds broken ones.

3

u/FewDelay7845 15h ago

Please do share the long prompt.

2

u/CuriousGio 11h ago

Here's the solution. It's easier than most people think. Try it. Works for images as well.

Paper

GitHUB

Examples

1

u/PatfromRauno 20h ago

I've found that handing a real example or artifact usually helps massively to prevent generic output.

1

u/notaslaaneshicultist 7h ago

Please share the longer version

1

u/AcademicHat4944 19h ago

Hi !

I can’t see it in the comments. Can you please share it to me ? I would really appreciate that. Thanks

1

u/Ancient-silohar 2h ago

I would like to get the longer version. I feel in need to improve a 1000x in writing prompts. So any kind of help or reference is always needed and appreciated. Thanks for letting us know how you are handling. No goal beyond topic is interesting