Any model, your call.

A prompt that worked beautifully in one app falls flat in another, or works on Monday and shrugs on Friday. Meanwhile someone online is very sure you are using the wrong AI.

You can relax about that last part. In one experiment by Jahani and colleagues, nearly 1,900 people wrote prompts for an image generator, trying to recreate a target picture. A newer model gave better results, and about half of that improvement came from people changing how they prompted. (On an open-ended creative task in the same study, the newer model did most of the work.) The model matters. So does the person typing, and that part comes with you to every app.

Assistants do differ, in ways that are easy to miss. Some remember you between chats and some don’t. Some can search the web, read a file or switch to a slower, deeper thinking mode, depending on the app and the plan. Their default style differs too. So a prompt that travels assumes nothing. It introduces you as if to a stranger, puts anything personal in square brackets you can refill, uses plain sentences with no app commands, and says what shape the answer should take. When it wants a feature, it says so and carries a plan B.

That is the gap between the two prompts on this page. The weak version only works where the assistant already knows you, and even there you can’t see what it thinks it knows. Anywhere else it guesses, with a straight face. The strong version carries its own context in three brackets, asks for a table so the shape holds in every app, and handles web search both ways: link the sources if you can, mark what I need to look up if you can’t. Send it to a friend on a different app and it should still work.

Choose the gear

The prompt is half of the setup. The other half is the switches around the chat box. For a quick question, the fast default is fine, and so is a free plan. For something you will act on, turn on the deeper thinking mode if your app has one. For anything that depends on current facts, such as prices, rules or opening hours, turn on web search and ask for links. If the question is about a document, attach the document. And for a topic you would not want remembered, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini each offer a temporary or incognito chat that stays out of memory.

Your call

The last choice is whether to ask at all. Some things are worth doing with your own head: the apology, the eulogy, the first attempt at a problem you are trying to learn. When the goal is to learn, the effort is the product, and several apps now have a learning mode built for that. Use the assistant to think better, not to think less.

That is the course. The whole anatomy lives on one page for when you need a reminder, and the library is full of prompts built this way. Pick one, fill in the brackets, and go ask a better question.