What is ask-how-to-improve-prompt?

A prompting method that asks an AI to inspect an instruction, find missing context or constraints, and rewrite it as a reusable prompt.

Use it to improve prompts for coding, research, writing, analysis, or repeatable team workflows.

It replaces trial and error with a review of why an instruction produced a vague or unsuitable result.

ask-how-to-improve-prompt — Skill for Claude Code by alivirgo

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills --skill ask-how-to-improve-prompt

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install major-ai-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills, 8 plugins.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,137 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00025	$0.01137
Opus 5	$0.00013	$0.00568
Sonnet 5	$0.00005	$0.00227
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00114

Measured yesterday against content hash ccebcdc3ec99, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-how-to-improve-prompt scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/ask-how-to-improve-prompt/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ask AI How to Improve Your Prompt (Meta-Prompting) (AI Skill)

Overview

Prompt engineering is not guessing magical keywords - it is providing the right balance of context, task constraints, and format specifications.

Instead of struggling through trial-and-error when a response falls flat, you can use Meta-Prompting: asking the AI itself to diagnose why your prompt was underspecified and write a significantly upgraded version.

The Meta-Prompting Feedback Loop

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 The Prompt Optimizer Engine                 │
│                                                             │
│  User Initial Prompt ──► [ AI Output Was Subpar / Generic ] │
│                                   │                         │
│  Meta-Audit Directive ◄───────────┘                         │
│  "Diagnose my prompt's missing context & rewrite it"        │
│           │                                                 │
│           ▼                                                 │
│  [ Upgraded Prompt Template with Constraints & Exemplars ]  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Master Meta-Prompt Templates

Pattern 1: The Prompt Doctor & Upgrader

Use this whenever an answer feels mediocre, generic, or off-target:

Review the prompt I gave you earlier: "[PASTE YOUR ORIGINAL PROMPT]"

Act as a Principal AI Prompt Engineer. Do the following:
1. **Gap Analysis**: What vital context, constraints, or formatting instructions was my prompt missing?
2. **Ambiguity Check**: Where could an LLM easily misunderstand my intent?
3. **Upgraded Prompt**: Rewrite my prompt into a state-of-the-art, production-grade template with explicit roles, guidelines, and output schemas.
4. **Demonstration**: Run the upgraded prompt right now and show the improved output.

Pattern 2: The Reusable Template Generator

Use this to turn a one-time success into a permanent team workflow:

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

yesterday Changed · -9 tokens per session ccebcdc3ec99
7d ago First seen · 122 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 64e4c72b51de

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-how-to-improve-prompt is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 1,137 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.

Building agents Prompt Optimization agent-skills agentic-skills ai-agent-skills ai-agents ai-coding common-sense efficiency learning meta-prompting prompt-engineering templates

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ask-how-to-improve-prompt