The Ten Moves

Prompting is not a secret vocabulary. It is the same discipline as briefing a capable new colleague who has no idea who you are: say what the situation is, who the output is for, what happens to it next, and what would count as done. Nine of the ten moves below also appear in Anthropic's published guide, Prompting best practices.

Six of the ten carry most of the weight. Give the situation. Give the reason behind a rule, so it generalizes past the case you named. Show two or three examples when the shape matters. Separate your instructions from the material you paste, with clear markers. Ask for the reasoning before the answer on anything with steps or arithmetic. And name the shape and the size — length, format, reader — because those are three different constraints.

Two more are worth building in permanently. Say what to do instead of what to avoid, because a negative instruction still puts the idea in front of the model. And break a long job into stages you can check: the outline first, corrected, then the draft. Every handoff is a chance to catch a wrong turn before it is built on.

The last two are for accuracy rather than style. On any document that matters, make it quote before it explains — quotations can be checked against the page, paraphrase cannot.

And when the answer matters, ask it to make the strongest case that it is wrong. That surfaces what it left out. It is a coverage check, not a truth check, and confusing the two is its own error.

The LastPsyOp Prompt Clinic runs these as choices rather than advice: two or three versions of a real request, and the question of which one holds up.