Prompting Dos and Don'ts
The best language to use when writing your prompt on Magic Patterns
General Tips
Our biggest tip is to be SPECIFIC as you can be. Select mode helps a lot with this. this. Remember that the LLM cannot read your mind.
- Remember you can attach screenshots when creating!
- VERY IMPORTANT: use select mode to get the most accurate results.
- You can use ChatGPT to generate a prompt for you because the more specific the better.
- If you don’t see any changes, ensure the AI actually hooked it up, i.e., it might have made a new page, but linked a button to a new page.
- If you want a new page, a good keyword to use is prompting for a new “route.”
Prompting Dos and Don’ts
If you are not seeing changes reflected, ask the AI to reflect on why you may not being seeing the changes. Often, what happens is the AI made the change, but it’s not actually “hooked up” or it’s displaying in a different location than what you expect.
✅ Do: Use a screenshot to recreate an existing design.
✅ Do: Provide specific context and role. You can use presets for this.
For example, you can prompt:
❌ Don’t: be unclear.
Bad example: checklist with 4 sections with 3 tasks each showing progress
✅ Do: rephrase in a way to be clear what you want
Better example: four sections with 3 checkboxes each. There should be a progress bar for each section that changes, according to the number of checkboxes checked
❌ Don’t: omit names of specific components.
Bad example: a box for checks in a list in screen thing
✅ Do: mention specific names of components. This is when it can help to use the technical terminology.
Better example: Three checkboxes in a list in a modal.
❌ Don’t: Upload lengthy product requirements documents expecting perfect results.
✅ Do: Break down large changes into smaller, focused updates and iterate.
If you prompt for lots and lots updates, the AI cannot do all that! You can ask it to create a PRD and then use that PRD as a guide, but you should only expect it to do a few updates at a time.
❌ Don’t: Give overly broad instructions like “make the page cleaner.”
✅ Do: use our Polish command.
❌ Don’t: Keep the thread going when results become inconsistent.
✅ Do:
- Fork your chat to start fresh
- Rollback to previous versions when stuck by clicking on a version in the dropdown in the top right corner
- If stuck, ask it to reflect on what is going on wrong and why it’s going wrong.
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