I Only Use 6 Prompts With AI

Here is a confession that will annoy every "prompt engineer" on the internet: after two years of using Claude every single day, I stopped writing new prompts.

I use six. That is it. Six templates do every task I have ever needed to do (and yes, I have tried to find a seventh, it does not exist).

The six

Research something. Summarize it. Rewrite it. Move it somewhere. Check it. Ship it.

Look at that list. Now look at your week. I will bet every task you do collapses into one of those six verbs. Writing a report? That is research plus summarize plus check. Cleaning up an email? Rewrite plus check. Organizing files? Move plus check. (Everything ends in check, because AI is confident and frequently wrong, but that is another post.)

Stop writing new prompts. Start reusing six. The blank page is the enemy, not the model.

Why templates beat improvising

When you write a fresh prompt every time, you are reinventing the same instructions over and over with slightly worse wording each round. That is not creativity. That is wasted keystrokes.

Save the six as templates. Now you pick one and fill in the gaps. Faster. Cleaner. The model gets a consistent instruction every time, so the output gets consistent too. No more "why did it do that differently this time" (it did it differently because you typed it differently, Dave).

Build your six. Use them for a week. Throw away everything else.