How to guide ChatGPT to prompt more efficiently?

This story is from 2026-08-27. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

I’ve been testing out prompting using chatgpt and have run into this problem where chatgpt complicates a simple prompt. It’s giving me so much text that it’s burning through my tokens. How do I ask it to be more efficient, given that we’re in the middle of a project. I’m worried about messing up th…