There is no single best kind of prompt. The right prompt depends on the job.
Common prompt types
Some useful categories include:
- direct instruction prompts
- few-shot prompts with examples
- transformation prompts that rewrite existing text
- extraction prompts that pull structured fields from unstructured input
- classification prompts that map input into a fixed set of categories
- planning prompts that ask the model to break work into steps
These patterns are often combined. A single production prompt might include instructions, examples, a schema, and retrieved context all at once.
Choosing the right pattern is less about theory and more about matching the prompt structure to the task you actually need done.