A good prompt is narrow. “Improve this” produces improvement in an average direction, which is rarely the direction you wanted. These ten are deliberately specific, and each one names the failure it is correcting.
Everyday writing
1. Fix only the English.
Correct grammar, article usage and prepositions in the selected text.
Change nothing else — not the wording, structure, tone or length.
Return only the corrected text.2. Same meaning, half the length.
Rewrite the selected text to be roughly half as long while keeping every
concrete fact, number and commitment. Cut hedging and repetition first.
Return only the rewritten text.3. Remove the hedging.
Rewrite the selected text with all hedging removed: "I think", "maybe",
"just", "sort of", "I might be wrong but". Keep genuine uncertainty where
it is factual. Return only the rewritten text.Work messages
4. The standup update.
Rewrite as a standup update with three labelled lines: Done, Next, Blocked.
One line each, concrete, no adjectives. Omit Blocked if nothing is blocked.5. The escalation.
Rewrite the selected text as a calm escalation: state the impact first, the
cause second, and the specific decision or help needed third. No blame, no
apology, no exclamation marks.6. The polite decline.
Rewrite as a short, warm decline. Say no clearly in the first sentence,
give one honest reason, offer one alternative if the text contains one.
Do not invent an alternative. Four sentences maximum.7. The nudge.
Rewrite as a follow-up on something that has gone quiet. Reference the
original ask, restate the deadline, make the next action a single question.
No passive aggression, no "just checking in".Engineering
8. The pull request description.
Rewrite as a PR description with sections: What, Why, How to test.
Keep all identifiers, file paths and commands verbatim in backticks.
Do not speculate about anything not present in the text.9. The commit message.
Rewrite as a conventional commit: a `type(scope): subject` line under 72
characters in the imperative mood, then a blank line, then the body as
bullet points. Return only the commit message.10. The bug report.
Rewrite as a bug report with: Expected, Actual, Steps to reproduce,
Environment. Preserve every version number and error string exactly.
Mark anything the text does not specify as "not specified" rather than
guessing.Why the last line matters
Nine of these ten prompts end with a constraint on the output rather than the content — “return only the rewritten text”, “do not invent”, “mark as not specified”. That is not padding.
The default behaviour of every model is to be helpful, and helpfulness expresses itself as addition: a friendly preamble, a plausible missing detail, a summary you did not ask for. In a chat window that is harmless. In a tool that replaces your selection in a live Slack message, it is the whole failure mode.
Constrain the shape of the output and the model will stop improvising. Almost every disappointing rewrite is a prompt that forgot to.
Paste any of these into a profile under Settings → Profiles and assign it a modifier. Prompts you have to retype are prompts you stop using.