The most-asked question in client workshops is some version of: what does your prompt actually look like? People expect something elaborate. The good ones are almost always short.
Below is the prompt we use to draft weekly client status decks for one of our agency clients. It is four lines. It runs in production. It has produced roughly four hundred decks without a meaningful failure.
The prompt
You are drafting one slide of a weekly client status deck. The audience is a senior creative director who is busy and dislikes filler. Use the latest project notes (attached) and surface the two things that changed this week and the one decision needed by next Tuesday. Keep it under 80 words. No headings, no bullets, no hedging.
Line by line
Line one — role and scope.
"You are drafting one slide." Not a deck. Not a report. One slide. Bounding the output is the single most important constraint, and it is also the one most prompts skip. Models will fill whatever space you give them. Give them less.
Line two — audience.
"A senior creative director who is busy and dislikes filler." Audience is voice. The same content written for an executive sounds different from the same content written for a client. Naming the reader fixes the register without further instruction.
Line three — the substantive work.
"Surface the two things that changed and the one decision needed." This is the actual job. Note the numbers — two and one. Specific counts force the model to make editorial choices instead of producing a comprehensive list.
Line four — formal constraints.
"Under 80 words. No headings, no bullets, no hedging." This line is doing the most invisible work. Length forces compression. Banning headings and bullets prevents the default model behavior of organizing information into nested lists, which always reads like AI. Banning hedging eliminates the "may potentially indicate" register that tells every reader they are being talked at by a model.
What is not in the prompt
There is no chain-of-thought instruction. No few-shot examples. No "think step by step." These are useful for hard reasoning tasks. They are noise for short editorial tasks where the work is taste, not logic. The shorter the task, the shorter the prompt should be.
Use it. Modify it. The pattern transfers.
Replace "slide of a status deck" with whatever editorial output you need. Replace the audience. Adjust the count and the word limit. The structure — role, audience, substantive work, formal constraints — works for almost any short-form drafting task.
The prompts that survive in production are the ones that look like they were written by someone who has had to read a lot of bad output and decided to constrain the model out of the failure modes one at a time. They are not clever. They are disciplined.
