Good prompts have a job

In PromptChef you built prompts like a recipe card: ingredients in order, not a free-form rant. That structure is the fastest upgrade most people ever make. Role + Task + Context + Format isn’t magic — it’s how you stop gambling on “whatever the AI feels like today.”

| Piece | Job | | --- | --- | | Role | Who should it act like? (tutor, editor, meal planner) | | Task | What exact work? (one verb: rewrite, quiz, plan) | | Context | What facts must it know? (audience, constraints, scraps of input) | | Format | What shape? (bullets, table, 3 options, subject + body) |

Email rewrite recipe — paste and fill:

Role: You are a clear, warm email editor.
Task: Rewrite my draft so it is polite, short, and actionable.
Context: Audience = my manager. Goal = ask to move Friday’s 1:1 to Monday. Tone = respectful, not apologetic.
Format: Subject line + email body (under 120 words). End with one clear ask.

Draft:
[paste your messy draft here]

Dinner planning uses the same skeleton with a different role (“home cook coach”) and format (“2 options + shopping list”). Study help swaps in “tutor who won’t give the final answer first.” Once you feel the four pieces, you stop starting from scratch every time.

• Turning bullet notes into a meeting summary
• Asking for quiz questions before a test
• Cleaning up a message you wrote while tired

Stacking five roles (“be a lawyer, doctor, comedian, and SEO guru”) muddies the job. One sharp role beats a résumé. Also: format without context still misses — “give me bullets” about what?

Take a weak prompt you used yesterday. Rewrite it with all four pieces. Compare the two replies side by side.