The difference between a useful response and an unusable one usually comes down to how much you told it. A vague question produces a vague answer, and the natural response to a vague answer is to ask again, which gets you a slightly different vague answer.
What an answer needs from you
Four things, and almost every weak prompt is missing at least one. What you want, so the goal is unambiguous. The context, including anything relevant you have already tried. The format, because asking for a table instead of a paragraph changes the answer substantially. And constraints, such as length, tone or what to leave out.
Of these, the one people skip most is the format, and it is often the one that matters most. The same request answered as a bulleted list and as flowing prose are genuinely different artefacts, and you already know which one you need.
Examples beat adjectives
Showing an example of what you want is far more effective than describing it. “Write in a friendly tone” produces something vaguely friendly. Two lines of an example showing the actual voice produces a match.
This also works for structure. If you want a table with particular columns, show the header row. If you want a particular format, paste a short sample. The model matches what it can see rather than what you describe.
Structure helps you more than it helps it
Formulas for prompts get treated as if they are magic, and they are not. Their real value is that a template forces you to state the goal, the context and the format before you press send, and thinking through those three is most of what makes a prompt good.
A well-structured plain paragraph often beats a template filled in badly, because the template can be filled with vague values that produce a vague result. If you can fill in the fields with specifics, the structure helps. If you are putting “some text” into the context field, write the sentence instead.
Iterate rather than restart
One thing worth avoiding is abandoning a promising response because the first attempt was partial. Asking for a correction, a different angle or a more specific version of one section usually beats starting again, because the model already has the context and you keep what worked.
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Two things that change results more than structure
Specific examples and constraints. These outperform any formatting trick, and they are the two things people skip.
An example works because it converts an abstract instruction into something concrete. Describing a tone produces a vague approximation; pasting three lines that have it produces a match, every time. The same applies to structure: show the column headings you want rather than naming them, and the table that comes back will match.
A constraint is anything that rules the answer out. Under a hundred words. No jargon. British spelling. Do not use bullet points. Refuse politely rather than guessing when the information is missing. Constraints remove whole categories of unhelpful responses, which is more efficient than asking for a correction afterwards.
Give it something to push against
When a response is wrong, a correction that explains why is far more useful than simply asking again. Saying which part missed and what the correct shape looks like gets you the right answer in one more step, whereas the same request repeated produces the same wrong answer with different wording.
The same applies to the first attempt. Including what you have already tried, and what happened, saves a round trip and often changes the response completely.
When not to use it
For anything requiring current accuracy, and for anything where a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer. These tools are good at structure, rewriting, summarising and drafting. They are unreliable on facts, figures, quotes and anything recent, and a plausible-looking invented citation is worse than no citation.
Verify anything you are going to publish or act on. Treat it as a fast first draft rather than a finished one.