Instructions describe. An example shows tone, length, structure, and what you leave out.

Before you ask an agent for this quarter's board memo, paste in last quarter's, the one you were actually happy with, and say "like this, for Q3." That's the whole move, and it beats any set of instructions you'll write.

Instructions describe. An example shows. Type "two pages, confident but not salesy, lead with the number," and the model has to guess what each of those means to you. Hand it the memo you'd put your name on, and it can see the tone, the length, how you open, where you put the bad news, and everything you leave out. You'd show a new hire last quarter's memo before asking for this quarter's. The agent's no different, except it reads faster and never gets tired of the comparison.

The people who build these things say the same. Anthropic's prompting guide for Claude calls examples one of the most reliable ways to steer tone and structure, and OpenAI's guide for ChatGPT files it under few-shot learning, which is the research term for the same idea: show a handful of finished ones instead of describing what you want.

Two things make it work. Pick the example you're proud of, not the average one. The model copies what you give it, warts included, so a mediocre example gets you a mediocre draft, just faster. And if you don't have a good one yet, you're one round away. Take the first draft it gives you, fix it the way you would anyway, and save the fixed version. That's the example for next time, which is why the second ask is always better than the first, and by the fifth it barely needs you.

This works for the customer summary, the deck outline, the weekly update, the reply to the board member who asks the same question every quarter. Anything you've done well once, you can now show instead of describe. What comes back isn't a generic first draft you have to wrestle into your voice. It reads like you wrote it on a good day.

Try it this week on the next thing you owe somebody. Then hit reply and tell me which document you used. I'm curious what people reach for first.