The 5-Part Prompt Skeleton I Use For Every Serious Task

After a year of daily use I stopped writing prompts freehand. Everything now goes through the same five blocks:

1. Role — "You are a senior Postgres DBA reviewing a production migration."
2. Context — the schema, the traffic shape, what already failed.
3. Task — one sentence, one verb. Not three tasks bundled together.
4. Constraints — "No downtime. Postgres 14. Must be reversible."
5. Output format — "Return a numbered plan, then the SQL, then the rollback SQL."

The block that people skip is #5, and it is the one that does the most work. Without it you get prose you then have to reformat by hand. With it you get something you can paste straight into a runbook.

One more rule: if the answer comes back wrong, do not argue with it in a follow-up. Edit the original prompt and re-run. Arguing compounds the confusion; editing removes it.