Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
OpenAI updated their prompting guide after GPT-5.6, and most of what we were all taught is now obsolete. "Think step by step," giant system prompts, role-playing as a senior engineer, their own testing found that minimal prompts actually score 10–15% better while using roughly half the tokens.
The new rule: describe the result you want, not the steps. The one thing that still matters is a clear "done condition", telling the model exactly when the job is finished.
Sources:
- OpenAI model guidance: developers.openai.com
- The Decoder's breakdown: the-decoder.com/openais-new-prompting-guide-tells-users-to-stop-overthinking-and-start-with-the-result
- Prompting guide analysis: aiquill.substack.com/p/gpt-56-prompting-guide
#ChatGPT #PromptEngineering
OpenAI updated their prompting guide after GPT-5.6, and most of what we were all taught is now obsolete. "Think step by step," giant system prompts, role-playing as a senior engineer, their own testing found that minimal prompts actually score 10–15% better while using roughly half the tokens.
The new rule: describe the result you want, not the steps. The one thing that still matters is a clear "done condition", telling the model exactly when the job is finished.
Sources:
- OpenAI model guidance: developers.openai.com
- The Decoder's breakdown: the-decoder.com/openais-new-prompting-guide-tells-users-to-stop-overthinking-and-start-with-the-result
- Prompting guide analysis: aiquill.substack.com/p/gpt-56-prompting-guide
#ChatGPT #PromptEngineering
