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Golden-Standard Prompts + Extra
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Golden-Standard Prompts + Extra

From polite prompts to billion-dollar playbooks — the definitive guide to turning words into unstoppable AI leverage

Vladyslav Podoliako's avatar
Vladyslav Podoliako
Apr 30, 2025
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Hi everyone, today I wanted to explain how you can:

Turning carefully-crafted words into billion-dollar leverage

and I will give you a tool for that.

Fun fact to kick things off: a recent survey shows that 12 % of people are polite to chatbots because they hope the bots will “spare them in a machine uprising.”

The rest of the findings break down like this:

  • 55 % say politeness is simply the right thing to do.

  • 20 % think extra words are a waste.

  • 13 % shrug and say, “It’s just a machine.”

Why should we care? Because tests show that polite, well-structured prompts lift GPT-4’s accuracy by roughly 30 %.

Words matter.

We will start by explaining why this is important. In one of the recent editions of my newsletter, I wrote about how new interface ideas spark massive shifts. Touchscreens re-made phones; TikTok’s swipe reshaped video.

4o/prompt: "create an image of a boy who is prompting with ai ”

Today’s hot interface is the prompt—the single line you give ChatGPT, Claude, or any LLM. One prompt can turn a half-formed thought into a full sales plan, a legal memo, or working code (I prove that).

Companies that grasp this are winning big:

  • Cursor calls itself “an IDE that reads your mind.”

  • Lovable lets you build web apps with sentences.

  • Manus ships AI agents in hours.

None of them own secret model weights; they own the prompts that aim those models at real business problems.

That’s the first lesson: the competitive edge lives in the words you feed the model, not the model itself.


Why do most prompts plateau

Most users type one vague question—“Write me an email” or “Summarise this PDF”—and feel let down when the answer is fuzzy. The model isn’t lazy; the prompt is starving it of detail.

Three things separate a throwaway prompt from a golden one:

  1. Specificity. Tell the model exactly what you want and why.

  2. Structure. Break a big request into smaller tasks so the model can follow steps.

  3. Format cues. Describe how the answer should look—tables, headings, or bullet lists.

These match the Effective Prompting Guide’s clear, structured, and format-aware advice. A golden prompt continuously checks those boxes before the first token flows.

Vlad's Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


Prompt engineering in plain English

Below is a quick tour, using simple language, of the daily prompt tactics professionals use.

Think of them as knobs and levers you can mix and match.

Use these tactics like spices—sprinkle the ones that fit your meal.


Meet Billion Dollar Prompter

My ready-to-use agent that bundles every winning prompt pattern

I can’t share all the late-night logs, but I can say this agent sits on top of the most expensive prompts, hiding behind leading AI products.

POV: me doing this, Agent at 2 am

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