Your vague prompts are why AI feels unreliable in production. Treat them as surgical specs—not hopes—and you’ll unlock repeatable, automatable results. Here’s how.
Prompts as Interfaces
Prompts are interfaces: define the role ("You’re my project manager"), the objective ("Identify 3 risks"), the inputs ("Here’s the context"), and the output format ("3 risks, 3 next steps, 1-paragraph summary").
Brevity beats verbosity: overly long prompts breed conflicting rules. ChatGPT thrives on crisp, Goldilocks-sized instructions—not essays.
Standardize like code: version-control templates. Consistency matters more than clever phrasing for scalable AI workflows.
3 Takeaways
Tech teams: Treat prompts like API contracts. Document, version-control, and audit them …
Your vague prompts are why AI feels unreliable in production. Treat them as surgical specs—not hopes—and you’ll unlock repeatable, automatable results. Here’s how.
Prompts as Interfaces
Prompts are interfaces: define the role ("You’re my project manager"), the objective ("Identify 3 risks"), the inputs ("Here’s the context"), and the output format ("3 risks, 3 next steps, 1-paragraph summary").
Brevity beats verbosity: overly long prompts breed conflicting rules. ChatGPT thrives on crisp, Goldilocks-sized instructions—not essays.
Standardize like code: version-control templates. Consistency matters more than clever phrasing for scalable AI workflows.
3 Takeaways
Tech teams: Treat prompts like API contracts. Document, version-control, and audit them for conflicts using ChatGPT’s self-review capabilities. This approach to AI tool integration ensures your team maintains governance and reduces production errors.
Non-tech leaders: Always specify who the AI should be, what you need, what you’re giving it, and how to format output. This discipline is core to any AI readiness assessment and digital transformation strategy.
Test ruthlessly: If outputs wobble, simplify—not expand—your prompt. Fewer moving parts = fewer failure points.
Real-World Example
At First AI Movers, we fixed chaotic sales-agent prompts by restructuring them into:
"Role: Sales analyst. Input: This lead’s email thread. Output: 1) Objection summary, 2) 2 rebuttals, 3) Next-step ask. Max 100 words."
Result? 70% fewer hallucinations and seamless workflow automation design for consistency across teams.
Limits & Fixes
Conflict risk: Long prompts often contain hidden contradictions (e.g., "Be concise" vs. "Explain thoroughly"). Fix: Run prompts through ChatGPT’s self-audit mode to catch logical conflicts before deployment.
Over-engineering: Custom roles can backfire if over-specified. Fix: Start with 3 core elements—role, task, format—then iterate based on output quality.
Your Next Move
Time to grab one messy prompt today. Rewrite it using the 4-spec framework. Measure output consistency for 48 hours. That’s how you turn AI from a toy into a revenue engine.
My Open Tabs
AI Tool: Brave
Brave is a privacy-first web browser, search engine, and platform with a built-in AI assistant (Leo), a Firewall+VPN, and a Brave Search API for programmatic web search.
It helps busy professionals by speeding browsing (blocks ads/trackers), summarizing pages and generating content with Leo, and offers enterprise controls (group-policy installs) plus custom Search API enterprise plans for RAG and model training.
Compliance: Brave emphasizes privacy, publishes privacy/terms and API security docs, and states Leo does not retain chats, but the search did not find SOC 2/HIPAA certifications or explicit EU data-residency guarantees—enterprises should verify compliance with Brave directly.
Written by Dr. Hernani Costa and originally published at First AI Movers. Subscribe to the First AI Movers Newsletter for daily, no‑fluff AI business insights and practical automation playbooks for EU SME leaders. First AI Movers is part of Core Ventures.