I’ve seen the mixed reviews on GPT-5, and maybe you’ve felt a little underwhelmed too. But I just stumbled upon an incredible video that changes everything! An AI professional just broke down a brand-new, official prompt guide from the OpenAI team, and it’s a total game-changer for getting the best results.
It turns out GPT-5 is an absolute powerhouse, especially for agentic tasks, but you have to know how to steer it. The YouTuber walks through exactly how to do it.
⚙️ Master the “Agentic Eagerness”
One of the coolest concepts the creator shared is what he calls “agentic eagerness.” This is your control knob for how much decision-making you want the model to do on its own.
By default, it’s super thorough: it will check every document and search every corner of the web. But you can tune this!
- For faster, cheaper answers: Lower the
reasoning effortparameter. The model will do less deep exploration. - For maximum thoroughness: Crank up the
reasoning effort. The model will be persistent until it’s certain it has the right answer.
✍️ A Prompt for Maximum Effort
The expert shared this amazing prompt to make the model incredibly persistent. I was blown away by how direct it is. You can tell the model to never stop until the job is done.
Here’s the prompt the video’s creator shared, which you can use to push the model to be fully autonomous:
You are an agent. Please keep going until the user’s query is completely resolved before ending your turn and yielding back to the user. Only terminate your turn when you are sure that the problem is solved. Never stop or hand back to the user when you encounter uncertainty. Research or deduce the most reasonable approach and continue. Do not ask the human to confirm or clarify assumptions as you can always adjust later. Decide what the most reasonable assumption is. Proceed with it and document it for the user’s reference after you finish.
🚀 Supercharge Your Coding
This is where things get really exciting. This innovator explained that GPT-5 is phenomenal at coding, especially front-end development, if you give it the right instructions.
- 📌 One-Shot Web App Trick: This is genius. The creator shows a technique where you tell the model to first create its own internal “excellence rubric” with 5-7 categories. Then, it has to build the app to meet the highest standards on its own rubric. This forces a level of self-reflection that produces incredible quality.
- 📌 Iterating on Existing Code: The guide suggests giving the model a set of rules about your codebase, including engineering principles, directory structure, and preferred stack (Next.js, Tailwind, etc.). This ensures it follows your existing patterns perfectly.
- 📌 A Key Finding: The team at Cursor found that GPT-5 is so naturally thorough that they had to tone down their prompts. With older models, they had to push for more context, but with this one, less is more!
✨ The New Prompt Optimizer Tool
To top it all off, the YouTuber demos a new “Optimize” button right in the OpenAI Playground. You give it your prompt, and it rewrites it for better performance, providing a line-by-line explanation for every change. It’s like having an AI prompt engineer helping you out!
This guide is packed with so many more details on things like tool preambles, using the right API, and metaprompting.
For the full deep-dive and to see these techniques in action, you absolutely have to watch the original video from the creator. Go check it out!