AI works best when it has clear instructions to follow, and effective prompting helps you get accurate, helpful results every time. If you're new to writing prompts, a few simple techniques can make your requests easier for AI to understand and act on.

This article will guide you through general prompting best practices as well as monday product specific best practices to get the most out of your AI prompting.

Check out our specific tips and examples for each monday AI product:

• AI blocks
• monday sidekick
• monday vibe
• monday magic

Prompting best practices

You may need to create a prompt using AI blocks in your column, need to prompt monday magic to create the right workflow for you, or prompt monday vibe to create a full app. No matter the feature, there are general prompting tips that will help you reach your desired result.

Follow these general guidelines to make sure you get more out of your prompts and reach your desired results:

Keep it specific

Clear prompts help AI understand what you’re trying to accomplish, even if you’re new to prompting. When you tell the AI exactly what you want — whether it’s a summary, a rewrite, or a new idea — it can respond with results that match your goals.

Think of prompting as giving directions: the clearer the instructions, the smoother the outcome.

Make it a conversation

When you’re starting out, it can help to think of prompts as a conversation with monday AI. The more detail you share up front—such as what you’re trying to achieve, who the message is for, or how long the response should be—the more accurate and tailored the output will be.

Add context

It also helps to add a bit of context so monday AI knows how to shape the response. This could include your tone, audience, format, or any details that matter for the task. Even simple additions like “make this formal”, “write this for a client”, or “summarize in two sentences” can make a big difference in accuracy.

Create a persona

Let the AI know what role it needs to play in order to generate appropriate answers. For example, you can tell it: "You are the head of the HR department and need to inform employees about a company-wide phishing simulation exercise. Create a message explaining the purpose of the exercise and remind everyone to remain vigilant against email scams..."

Define the audience

Specify your exact target audience, as different audiences have different needs and expectations. For example, you could say: 

“Write a short project update for internal team members who are already familiar with the project. Use a friendly, concise tone. Summarize the key progress made this week, call out any blockers the team should be aware of, and include one clear next step.”

Refine and iterate

As you get more comfortable with prompting, you can refine or iterate by asking AI to adjust its output. You don’t need to get the perfect prompt on the first try — small tweaks help guide the AI toward your ideal result.

Important up front or at the end

AI tends to struggle with important information buried in the middle of the prompt, so try to keep the most crucial points at the beginning or end of your prompt.

For example: “I need a three-sentence summary written for executives. Below is background information to help you craft it. Only focus on major outcomes and risks, and ignore minor operational details.”

AI blocks

AI blocks can provide you with countless helpful solutions for using columns, automations, and the AI workflow builder to get the most out of the data in your monday account. To ensure you get best results, follow the general guidelines outlined above and take a look at the following examples that showcase how to yield better results.

Tips to keep in mind:

• Remember that you're only charged credits once for all AI blocks you trigger on the same item within a 24 hour period, so you can split things up into two columns to avoid overcomplicating a prompt and potentially running into errors
• Avoid using a formula format for calculations. Using natural language will likely work much better
• Avoid using passive language in your prompts, as active will yield better results. For example:
  • Passive: Generate a price quote using the budget listed in the Numbers column
  • Active: Use the budget in the Numbers column to generate a price quote
• Use positive language as opposed to negative, state what you want, not what you don't want. For example:
  • Negative language: "Do not give a score of over 90"
  • Positive language: "Give scores between 0 and 90."

Example prompts:

monday sidekick

monday sidekick is great for:

• retrieving information from online and adding it into your board either on existing items/updates or as a new column
• pulling insights from your board, filtering through the information, and retrieving key areas you are looking for
• one off requests (as opposed to automating processes, which you can use monday automations or the AI workflow builder for)
• rewriting materials (summarizing, extracting information, etc.)
• creating monday docs (for example, to generate a report and output it as a monday doc)
• generating images

Ready to use prompts:

For each of the following prompt examples, simply plug the prompt into the chat box once you've opened up sidekick.

 

Board insights:

To get board insights from sidekick, try to ask the agent a question like or similar to:

Prompt: "How many items per priority are there?"

 

Board assistance:

You can ask sidekick to help you with maintaining your board with prompts such as:

Prompt: "Teach me how to hide subitems and customize asset cards view".

 

Building:

Try to ask sidekick to build specific boards:

Prompt: "Help me build a strategic communications board with columns and groups".

 

Operating:

You can have sidekick help you with laborious manual tasks such as:

Prompt: "Bulk remove '(Copy)' from all item names".

Larger scope prompt examples:

Weekly sprint planning template

Generate a comprehensive sprint planning framework with user stories, acceptance criteria, and time estimates.

Prompt:

"Create a sprint planning template for a 2-week sprint. Include sections for:

1. Sprint goals and objectives

2. User story breakdown with acceptance criteria

3. Task estimation and capacity planning

4. Risk assessment and mitigation strategies

5. Definition of done checklist. Make it actionable for a development team of 6 people."

Employee onboarding checklist

Create a structured onboarding process for new hires across different departments.

Prompt:

"Design a comprehensive employee onboarding checklist that covers:

1. Pre-arrival preparations

2. First day orientation schedule

3. Week 1-4 integration milestones

4. Training and development pathways

5. 90-day review checkpoints. Include department-specific customizations and manager responsibilities."

Marketing campaign performance dashboard

Create a comprehensive tracking system for multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Prompt:

"Design a marketing campaign tracking dashboard that monitors:

1. Cross-channel attribution and ROI

2. Lead generation and conversion funnels

3. Content performance metrics

4. Budget allocation and spend tracking

5. Audience engagement analytics. Include automated reporting and optimization recommendations."

Customer success onboarding journey

Design a systematic approach to onboard new customers and ensure successful adoption.

Prompt:

"Create a customer success onboarding framework including:

1. Welcome sequence and expectations setting

2. Product training and certification paths

3. Success milestone tracking

4. Health score monitoring

5. Escalation and intervention protocols. Include personalization based on customer segments."

For even more ready to use prompts, please check out the Prompt library for monday sidekick

monday vibe

New to vibe coding? Not sure where to start with monday vibe?

Before you build anything, think about your end goal:

Try to focus on including the following:

• What you're building (for example, a sales dashboard)
• Who it's for (for example, sales reps) - what are their pain points?
• Tasks they'll do (for example, log deals) - what are the top 2 or 3 jobs to be done?
• Look and feel (dark mode) - how should it feel?

Keep these tips in mind before starting your vibe prompting:

• Before you start, stop and think about the end user
  • Identify who the output is for and what they actually need
  • Add detailed instructions like "Create this for a non-technical customer"
• Start small and build iteratively 
  • Begin with a general framework and then refine based on the output in followup prompts
• Be specific
  • As you iterate, give the most specific and detailed instructions you can - the more you explicitly ask for, the more likely the output will match your needs
• Don't fix, revert
  • If the app output is way off track from what you're looking for, revert to the previous version of the app, as sending multiple followup prompts to try to fix it will introduce more bugs and issues - it's better to restart fresh with a more refined prompt

For more monday vibe prompting guidelines, please check out the Create code-free custom apps with monday vibe article.

monday magic

If you want to ensure you get the best possible result when using monday magic to build out work solutions, make sure that you specify your required work flow.

For example, if you are a hairdresser, you need to specify which flow you're looking to build.

Do you need a payment flow? Customer registration? Appointment keeping? The more specific you are with your needs, the more accurate the work solution will be.

As with any other prompting, iterating and tweaking after getting your initial result will also help you reach your desired results.

monday magic currently supports creating the following types of entities:

• Dashboards
• Forms
• Boards - Items, Columns, Forms, and Widgets