Prompt Engineering That Works

An LLM has never seen your codebase, your style guide, or your definition of 'good'. Everything it knows about the task is what you wrote down. Vague prompts don't get 'reasonable defaults' — they get the statistical average of everything similar in the training data.

That's why specificity wins. 'Summarize this' gets a generic summary. 'Summarize in 3 bullets, under 15 words each, lead with the decision needed, flag anything time-sensitive' gets the summary you actually wanted.