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Structure of a prompt: four slides that fix the order almost everyone gets wrong

Anthropic · four-slide carousel, undated
30 de julio de 2026 por
Structure of a prompt: four slides that fix the order almost everyone gets wrong
Andrés Briñez

What there is: four slides — a cover, a numbered list of ten elements, a full worked example applying that order, and a final slide carrying the logo of whoever reposted it. The order proposed is task context, tone, data and documents, the detailed description with its rules, examples, conversation history, the immediate request, the instruction to think before answering, the output format, and the start of the reply.

What I took from it

Where the documents go. Near the top, before the instructions, rather than pinned to the end as most people do it. The difference shows once the material is long: rules written after the data carry more weight than rules written before it.

Putting the actual request near the end, after the rules and the examples. That is the reverse of how anyone writes naturally, which is to lead with what you want and explain the context afterwards.

And the part that helped most in practice: leave the output format last and start the answer yourself. When what you need is a structured value another process will read, those two things halve the retries.

What I left out

It should be said what this is: a vendor's outreach material, not documentation. It does not explain why the order works or what happens when you break it, and one of the instructions it shows — telling the model to take a deep breath — belongs to a period when those formulas still changed something. The copy in circulation carries a lead-generation agency's branding on the last slide, a decent reminder of how one ends up reading this kind of thing.

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