With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, OpenAI has recently released a new official guide for prompts (Prompt) for its latest GPT-5.5 model. This guide conveys a key message: developers must abandon the long and detailed instructions written for older models and shift to a more concise and result-oriented communication style.

GPT

Old Instructions Become Performance Bottlenecks

OpenAI clearly warns that directly migrating old version prompts to GPT-5.5 may backfire. In the past, due to limited reasoning capabilities of models, developers often needed to provide extremely detailed step-by-step instructions. However, these extra descriptions now reduce the model's search space, leading to stiff and mechanical responses.

The official recommendation is for developers to build instructions from scratch, keeping only the target output, success criteria, and necessary constraints. Instead of detailing every step the model should take, it's better to tell it directly, "Solve this problem, what are the success criteria?" allowing the model to find the optimal path on its own using its enhanced reasoning efficiency.

Role Definition Returns to the Core

Interestingly, the "role definition," which once sparked controversy in the prompt community, has regained official recognition in the GPT-5.5 era. OpenAI recommends a seven-part prompt structure, placing "role definition" at the top to set the model's identity and responsibilities.

In addition, to reduce perceived latency during streaming output, the guide also suggests adding a "greeting" mechanism, sending one or two confirmation messages before executing complex tasks. This deep optimization strategy for GPT-5.5 not only improves the model's logical accuracy but also significantly enhances the user experience.