10 AI Prompting Hacks for Better Results

1. Prompt Pruning: Delete unnecessary instructions your AI never asked to emotionally process. 2. Shorter prompts can sometimes work better because AI doesn't need your autobiography before answering. 3. Context-First Prompting: Give AI the source material first, then tell it what you actually want. 4. Basically, stop making AI solve the mystery before you've handed it the clues. 5. Tool Minimalism: Give AI agents only the tools they need, not the digital equivalent of an entire Home Depot. 6. Search-Grounded Answers: If the answer depends on current facts, let AI search instead of confidently time-travelling from its training data. 7. Code-Backed Calculations: Make AI use code for serious calculations because vibes are not a recognised unit of mathematics. 8. Context Caching: Reusing large chunks of context through supported APIs can save you from repeatedly paying AI to reread the same novel. 9. Schema-Locked Outputs: Force structured output when you need clean JSON instead of AI creatively redecorating your data format. 10. Reasoning on Demand: Save heavier reasoning for genuinely difficult problems, not questions like "What's 17% of 200?" 11. Faster models and lighter settings can handle straightforward tasks without summoning the computational Avengers. 12. Eval Your Prompts: Test prompts against multiple examples because one amazing response proves approximately one thing. 13. Build a small test set so every prompt change doesn't become a surprise party for your workflow. 14. Permission-Limited Agents: Give autonomous agents only the permissions they genuinely need to complete the task. 15. Your email-writing agent probably does not need permission to reorganise your entire digital existence. 16. Restricting permissions can reduce the damage caused by mistakes, misunderstood instructions, or malicious prompt injections. 17. Ground important answers in external sources when accuracy matters because AI confidence and AI correctness are different subscriptions. 18. Use structured schemas for machine-readable workflows so your automation doesn't have an existential crisis parsing the response. 19. Match the model, tools, context, and reasoning effort to the task instead of using maximum everything like you're launching a satellite. 20. The ultimate AI hack is surprisingly boring: better context, fewer unnecessary tools, proper testing, and tighter permissions.