A one-line gets you one-line-quality work. The fix isn’t writing more text — it’s writing the right text. Five lines, in this order:
- Role — who Claude should act as (“You’re helping a credit-risk analyst…”)
- Goal — what the work is for (“…prep for Tuesday’s risk committee.”)
- Task — the actual ask (“Summarise the attached Q3 portfolio report.”)
- Constraints — what must be true (“Plain language, no jargon, under 300 words.”)
- Context — what to read first (“File:
Q3-portfolio.pdfin this folder.”)
Bad: “summarise this PDF.”
Good (all five lines):
You’re helping a credit-risk analyst prep for Tuesday’s risk committee. Summarise
Q3-portfolio.pdffor a non-technical audience. Plain language, no jargon, under 300 words. Lead with the three biggest changes vs. Q2.
You can drop lines when they’re genuinely obvious — but most one-line prompts are missing three of the five, not one. The template isn’t a checklist to recite, it’s the shape of the briefing a colleague would need if you handed the task off in person.
Works for code too, but it shines on non-code work — analyses, summaries, reports, emails, decks — where there’s no file path to anchor the prompt and Claude has to guess at the purpose.