Skip to main content

The art of prompting

Gainable understands natural language, but how you describe things affects what you get. This guide will help you write prompts that produce exactly what you want.

The golden rule

Be specific about your data, clear about relationships, and explicit about features.The more specific your prompt, the more accurate your app.

5 key principles

1. Name your fields explicitly

Tell Gainable exactly what data you want to track.
Why this matters: When you name fields, Gainable creates exactly those fields. When you’re vague, it has to guess.

2. Describe relationships

If data is connected, say how.
Common relationship patterns:
  • “X belongs to Y” - Each X is linked to one Y
  • “X has many Y” - One X can have multiple Y items
  • “X and Y are linked” - They reference each other

3. Describe the user journey

Explain how people will use the app.

4. Request features by name

Use specific feature names when you know what you want.

5. Iterate incrementally

Build your app step by step instead of all at once.
1

Start with the basics

“Build a task tracker with title, description, and status”
2

Add more fields

“Add due date and priority to tasks”
3

Add visualization

“Add a dashboard with a chart showing tasks by status”
4

Add advanced features

“Add a kanban board view”
Incremental building is more reliable than trying to specify everything upfront. Each step is smaller and easier for Gainable to get right.

Prompt structure

A well-structured prompt typically has 3 parts:

1. What you’re building (the entity)

2. What data it stores (the fields)

3. What you can do with it (the features)

Complete example

Here’s a well-structured prompt that combines all principles:
This prompt is specific about data, clear about features, and describes the user journey.

What to avoid

These patterns lead to unpredictable results:

Learn more

Best practices

Detailed dos and don’ts

Examples

Real prompts you can copy

Common patterns

Templates for common app types