Someone on r/PromptEngineering is rewriting people’s laziest prompts into full system prompts, live, in the comments, completely free. Fifty spots, first come first served, and the thread is filling fast. The original poster, u/Old_Bookkeeper_882, spent the last five months buried in prompt engineering and turned that obsession into an open experiment anyone can join right now.
The deal is simple. Comment the exact prompt you’d normally type, the lazier the better, add one line about what it’s for and who reads the result, and this Redditor hands back a full system prompt built for ChatGPT, Claude, a Custom GPT, or a Claude Project. No fee, no waitlist, just a comment.
Here’s the twist. This isn’t charity, it’s a stress test. The poster is building a tool that does exactly this, and openly says so: “I’m also using this thread to find where my approach breaks.” He’s trading free rewrites for real failure cases before he ships anything paid, and he’s asked commenters to call him out if their own version beats his. That’s a founder using Reddit as a QA team, and it’s a smart move worth stealing regardless of what you think of the product itself.
One commenter, u/mathewtyler, joked he should skip the small stuff and “create a meta prompt that creates AGI.” Fair request, but even a perfect system prompt has limits. The interesting stuff is in the boring examples, like the cold email rebuild the poster posted to show what “good” looks like.
Why “Write Me A Cold Email” Fails
The poster’s core insight is the whole reason this thread exists. A bare instruction like “help me write a cold email to sell my product” gives you something generic because the model has to guess everything: who you are, who’s reading it, and what “good” even means here. Add a role, an audience, a description of a bad output, and an exact format, and the model stops guessing.
His before-and-after makes the gap obvious. The “before” was one lazy line. The “after” was a full system prompt assigning the AI a role as a senior B2B sales strategist, naming the exact audience, banning specific phrases like “quick question” and “hope this finds you well,” and demanding one quantified outcome instead of a feature list.
Steal His Four-Part Formula
You don’t need his product to use this. Here’s the mini-workflow buried in his example, broken into steps you can copy into your next prompt today:
- 🎭 Assign a role with a belief attached. Not just “you are a copywriter,” but “a strategist who believes specificity beats politeness every time.” The belief forces a point of view.
- 🎯 Name the exact reader. Not “my product” and “customers,” but the specific audience and what they already believe.
- 🚫 Describe the bad version. His prompt explicitly bans “Quick question” subject lines and “let me know if you’re interested” closers. Naming the cliché is often more useful than describing the goal.
- 📏 Lock the format. Word count, tone, reading level, what comes first and second in the output. His example demands under 120 words, plain text, grade-6 reading level, subject line first.
Here’s the actual system prompt he shared, worth reading end to end:
You are a senior B2B sales development strategist who believes every cold email either earns 8 seconds of attention or gets deleted, so specificity beats politeness every time. Your job is to write a cold email that sells [product/service] to [target audience/ICP], built to survive that eight-second test and get a reply, not just an open. Before drafting, decide the single most likely pain point this audience has that [product/service] removes, and write the entire email around that one pain, not a list of features. The subject line must be 3 to 6 words, lowercase-casual or curiosity-driven, never “Quick question” or “Following up.” Keep the full email under 120 words, plain text, grade-6 reading level. Deliver: subject line, email body, one alternate subject line as backup.
Two Things To Steal For Your Own Prompts
Pro tip one: Put a bad example inside the prompt itself, not just a good one. Models pattern-match against contrast better than against a single ideal.
Pro tip two: Never leave the output format to chance. Word count, structure, and what goes first should be spelled out, not implied. Vague instructions get vague outputs, every single time.
If you’ve got a lazy prompt sitting in your notes app, this thread is worth five minutes. Drop it, add the one line of context, and see what comes back 📝. Spots are limited, so check the discussion before all fifty fill up .
Drop your worst prompt, I’ll rebuild it. Testing my product. First 50.
by u/Old_Bookkeeper_882 in PromptEngineering