Prompt Teardown is a weekly newsletter about prompts. Every issue breaks down 4 real prompts, tells you what works, calls out what doesn’t, and gives you a fixed version you can copy.
It’s model-agnostic. The prompts come from real people using real tools. We cover Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others. The patterns apply everywhere.
Each issue is a 4-minute read. Here’s what’s in it and how to get the most out of it.
What you’ll find in each issue
Every issue has 3 sections. They run in the same order every week.
The Take comes first. It’s a short opinion piece that pattern-matches across the week’s prompts and names what’s worth noticing.
The Take sets up the issue. It’s not a summary. It’s a point of view.
Seen This Week is the middle section. It has 3 picks. Each pick is a useful prompt we found with at least 1 gap. For each pick, you get:
- A simplified version of the original prompt (under 100 words, rewritten by us)
- A “why it works” note
- A “one gap” note
- A “simple fix” note
- An optional follow-up turn if you want to go deeper
These are ready to use. Plug in your own situation and send.
The Teardown is the final section. 1 prompt. This is the deep dive. We take a flawed prompt, critique it, and rewrite it. More on this structure below.
That’s 4 prompts per issue: 3 picks + 1 teardown. The Take comments on patterns across all 4.
2 ways to read it
The newsletter works for 2 types of readers. You don’t have to pick one. Most people shift between them depending on the week.
Read to run. You want prompts you can copy, fill in, and send. The 3 picks in Seen This Week are built for this. Each one is under 100 words and ready to go. Over time, your inbox becomes a searchable library of prompts you can pull up by keyword whenever you need one.
Read to learn. You want to understand why prompts work or don’t. The Teardown section is where this happens. You see the original, the critique, the rewrite. You start to notice structural patterns that show up across different prompts and different models.
The best prompters aren’t the ones who memorize templates. They’re the ones who understand the limitations and can get good results in fewer turns.
Most readers will spend most of their time in read-to-run mode. That’s fine. The learning happens either way.
How to read a teardown
Each teardown has 4 parts.
- Excerpt. Enough of the original prompt to show the flaw. We don’t always print the full thing, but you see the part that matters.
- Prompt Teardown. The critique. What’s wrong with the prompt, why it produces worse output than it should, and what structural choice is causing the problem.
- Build Up. The rewrite. A tighter version of the prompt that fixes the specific flaw called out in the critique.
- Credit. A link to the original source so you can see the full context.
You can read a teardown in under 2 minutes. The point isn’t to memorize the fix. It’s to start recognizing the same patterns in your own prompts.
Your inbox is the library
Every issue you receive stays in your inbox. When you need a prompt for a specific task, search your email for a keyword. The picks are short enough that email search usually surfaces the right one.
If you want a more structured library outside email, a snippet manager like SnippetsLab, or even a diary app like Day One is decent. Whatever lets you tag and organize them. Your computer’s default notes app, with tags or folders, works well.
What we don’t cover
Not everything falls within our scope. Here’s what you won’t find in Prompt Teardown:
- Jailbreaks, prompt injection attacks, or anything designed to make models behave in ways their creators didn’t intend
- Image generation prompts (text-to-text and text-to-image prompting are different enough to deserve separate treatment)
- Model rankings or “best model” claims
We don’t rank models. You’ll never see us say “Claude is better than GPT” or vice versa. Different models have different strengths, and the interesting question is always how to adapt your prompting approach to the tool you’re using, not which tool is “best.”