Natural-language requests vs. long structured prompts: what actually improves performance?

Thank you all for the replies. This has been very helpful for me. I don’t have many people around me who talk about prompting in this way. I’m not an engineer, and most prompt examples I usually see are template-like, so I sometimes wondered if my way of working with ChatGPT was a bit unusual. Reading your examples was genuinely encouraging. It’s fun to see that other people are using similar patterns in practice. I’m starting to think the useful distinction is not simply “natural language vs structured prompts,” but “which format works best at which stage of the workflow.” For small tasks, natural language is often enough. For larger tasks with many constraints, a structured format helps. But in my experience, the strongest pattern is often: natural conversation → structured artifact → execution or implementation So maybe structured prompts are not always the starting point. Sometimes they are an intermediate artifact created from the conversation.