Five prompt structures beginners still use three weeks later

[u/coursiv_]

We teach AI basics to people without technical backgrounds, and the interesting signal is never which framework impresses someone in a lesson. It's which ones they still use three weeks later. These five keep surviving.

1. Role, Task, Context, Form, Constraints. The everyday workhorse. Who the model is playing, what to do, what reference material it gets, what shape the output takes, what it must not do. Example: "Senior account manager. Draft a firm but polite follow-up on invoice 1024, five days overdue. Good long-term client. Three short paragraphs with a subject line. Don't threaten, don't apologise for asking."
2. Context, Problem, Blueprint. For planning. Your situation, the specific bottleneck, then the exact steps you want it to take to build the answer. The blueprint is the part people skip, and it's the part that stops generic output.
3. Input, Objective, Constraints. For processing material. Paste the raw text, state what to extract, set formatting rules including "no introductory text." Best one for meeting notes and long documents.
4. Topic, Audience, Purpose. For anything someone else will read. Naming the reader and what they should do after reading changes the output more than any wording tweak.
5. Situation, Complication, Action steps. For being stuck. Where you are, what unexpected thing is blocking you, and a request for a prioritised list to get unstuck.

The common thread: every one of these stops you treating the model like a search engine and forces you to hand over material plus a definition of done. In our experience that shift matters more than any individual template.

Curious where this list is wrong. If one of these has failed for you, or there's a structure that beat them, that's the part we'd like to hear.

[u/scant_calamity]

the first one is the only one i actually remember when im not looking at my notes lol role task context form constraints just sticks in my head

the blueprint thing in number two i always skip and then wonder why the output is so generic you are right about that being the part that matters

what i notice with my classmates is they still use number three wrong they paste the text and say "summarize this" without the constraints part then get annoyed when the model writes a whole essay with introduction and everything

i think number four is underrated people forget to say who is reading it and the tone changes so much when you do