What you'll have at the end

A rewritten prompt with each fixed mistake logged next to the checklist item that caught it

Before you start

You need

A prompt you already send to a chatbot for a real task, at least two real inputs you can rerun it against, and one reply from it you would genuinely call wrong.

Not covered

A prompt failing because of a sampling setting like temperature needs a different fix than a checklist over the wording itself.

Leans on

Prompt Engineering Cheat SheetCarries the anti-pattern rows this checklist's items line up against, plus the row explaining that a stated word count is a soft target while max-tokens only truncates, the exact distinction the length catch depends on.
AI-LLM Task Capabilities Cheat SheetNames summarization as an abstractive task and covers structured output formatting, both what the rewritten prompt is actually asking the chatbot to do reliably.

Where to go next

Fix wrong-format answers with two or three few-shot examples

If the checklist's own catch turns out to be a missing worked example rather than a scope or format gap, this recipe is the fix, not another audit pass.

Have a chatbot rewrite your own messy prompt for you

If you would rather hand the whole messy prompt to a chatbot and let it untangle it than work down a fixed checklist by hand, this recipe takes that shortcut instead.

Audit a failing prompt against a checklist of common mistakes

Before you start

Where to go next

Audit a failing prompt against a checklist of common mistakes

Before you start

Where to go next