Build your first simple assistant from three small prompts

The word “assistant” can sound technical. It does not have to be. A simple assistant is a set of saved prompts that you use in the same order, every time you do a certain job. You can build one in an afternoon with nothing but an AI chat assistant and a notes app.

This tutorial has two steps. First you turn a prompt that works into a template. Then you chain three templates into a workflow.

Step one: turn a good prompt into a template

Start with a small win. You wrote a good prompt and it gave a useful answer. A week later you need almost the same thing for a different product. So you open the old prompt, change a few words and hope you caught them all.

Then it happens a third time. The format line gets lost, or the old product name stays in. A subject line proudly advertises the wrong app. Copying and editing by hand is slow, and it breaks things.

A template is a prompt with blanks. You keep the parts that never change, and you mark the parts that do with placeholders in square brackets. Take this working prompt:

“You are an email marketer. Write five subject lines for our invoicing app, aimed at cafe owners. Format: a numbered list, under ten words each.”

Ask what would change next time. The role might. The number might. The product and the audience almost certainly will. Replace each one:

“You are a [ROLE]. Write [N] subject lines for [PRODUCT], aimed at [AUDIENCE]. Format: a numbered list, under ten words each.”

Notice what did not become a blank. “Subject lines” and the format stayed fixed, because this template is built for subject lines. The blanks show where you may change things, and they also show where you may not. The parts that made the prompt good are the fixed parts, so leaving them alone keeps the quality steady.

Step two: chain three prompts

Real work is rarely one prompt. It is a chain of small jobs. A weekly update starts as a pile of messy notes. Someone turns the notes into a draft. Someone else checks the draft before it goes out. Each job needs a different kind of attention: tidying needs patience, drafting needs voice, and checking needs a cold eye.

Most people try to do all of it in one giant prompt. The answer comes back muddy and it is hard to see where it went wrong. A workflow fixes that. It is a set of steps, each done by its own prompt, where the output of one step becomes the input to the next.

Build it for a weekly update

Pick one real task you do every week, something a little tedious. Break it into three steps and give each step one job.

• Step one, clean: “You are a careful note-taker. Turn these raw notes into a clean list of items, one per line. Format: a bulleted list. Notes: [NOTES].”
• Step two, draft: a prompt that turns the clean list into the update, in the headings and length you want, with the list as its placeholder.
• Step three, check: a prompt that reads the draft against the clean list and flags anything that does not match, such as a number that changed.

Each step is a template with a role, a task and a format. Each stays short and easy to read. When something goes wrong, you know which step to fix. You change that one prompt and leave the others alone.

Run it and keep it

Paste your raw notes into step one. Copy its output into step two. Copy that draft into step three. Read the final result yourself before it goes anywhere. The assistant saves you the tedious parts, but you remain the editor.

Then save all three templates together under one clear name, in the order you use them. Next week, you open the file and paste. If one step keeps missing, improve that template and save the new version.

Choosing the tool

You may wonder which AI tool to run this in. Rankings go out of date quickly, because assistants are updated every few months. A better method does not expire. Run the same prompt in two tools, compare the answers side by side, and judge them on format, facts and how much editing each needs. It takes about ten minutes and it uses your own task, not someone else's.