Stop Writing "Be Concise". Give It A Word Budget Per Section.

I asked for a concise release note about forty times before I noticed the pattern: "concise" is interpreted relative to whatever the model thinks the topic deserves. A schema change gets three paragraphs. A copy tweak gets three paragraphs. The word does nothing.

What actually works is a budget, per section, stated as a number:

`
Write the release note in exactly three sections.

• What changed: 40 words max, plain language, no jargon

• Who is affected: 25 words max, name the user group

• What you need to do: 30 words max, imperative, one action per line

Do not add a heading, a preamble, or a sign-off.
`

Three things happen at once.

The output gets shorter. Obviously. But it gets shorter in the right places, because a budget forces a choice about what matters instead of trimming everything evenly.

The output gets comparable. Twelve release notes written to the same budget can be skimmed as a set. Twelve "concise" ones cannot.

Revisions get cheap. "Section two is too long" is an argument. "Section two is 60 words, the budget is 25" is a fact, and the re-run fixes it in one pass.

The failure case: budgets under about 15 words start producing telegraphese that drops articles and reads badly. If you need something that short, ask for a fragment explicitly - "a noun phrase, not a sentence" - rather than squeezing the number further.

I now put a number on every section of every structured output I ask for. It is the single highest-leverage edit I have made to my prompts this year.