What finally made prompting from examples click for me

A compact prompt and the response it produced. Replace the bracketed parts with your own details.

AI & Prompt Engineeringgemini-2.5-pro#ai

Nico Lane

Help me turn three good examples and one bad example into a clear repeatable instruction.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Geminigemini-2.5-pro

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For prompting from examples, I would start with these checks:

Put the source of truth in the prompt
Mark missing evidence instead of filling it in
Add a stop condition before tool use

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Nico Lane

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

2 comments

Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
The failure case changed how I approached the whole thing.
- Lucia Marin@luciamarin·2w ago
  That was the part I reused too.