By skyforbes 
These tiny commands turn ChatGPT into a reliable, structured, and fast assistant — without the guesswork.
Okay, real talk.
You type a prompt. You hit enter. And boom — ChatGPT dumps a wall of text that’s 30% useful, 70%… “huh?”
We’ve all been there. Frustrating.
Here’s the good news: you don’t need to fight the AI. You just need to tell it what you actually want. That’s where shortcut prompts come in. Tiny instructions you drop at the top of your prompt to make ChatGPT behave like a helpful assistant, not a rambler.
Think of them like cheat codes. But… you know, legal cheat codes.
My Daily Go-To Shortcuts
These are the ones I reach for every single day:
- /ELIS — Explain like I’m 5. Perfect when I’m too tired to deal with jargon.
- /TLDL — Summarizes long text in a few lines. Life saver for long reads.
- /CHECKLIST — Turns any answer into a neat, actionable list. Seriously, copy-paste ready.
- /STEP-BY-STEP — Makes the AI show its reasoning. Awesome for tricky problems.