The only 5 viral ChatGPT prompts worth keeping

50 tested, 5 kept

A developer called Arslan Qutab ran 50 of the prompts circulating on Reddit through real work and published what survived. His keeping rule is the useful part: "if it doesn't save you time or teach you something new, it's not worth keeping".

His five were aimed at code, datasets and developer documentation. Below they are pointed at the work most of us actually do: a spreadsheet that has gone wrong, a pile of notes, last month's numbers, one product photo and a process living only in your head. Two of them keep his exact phrasing, because that phrasing is the reason they work.

3 things that decide whether these land

1. 📎 Paste the real thing, not a description of it. The whole reason these beat a generic prompt is that they work on your actual material. Paste the real formula, the real notes, the real numbers. ChatGPT reads files and images too, so an upload counts.
2. 🎯 Give it one line of context. What the thing is meant to do, and what is happening instead. That single line is usually the difference between a textbook answer and one about your situation.
3. ↩️ Ask for the fixed version back. An explanation is nice, a corrected formula you can paste straight into the cell is better. Every prompt below ends by asking for something usable, not just an opinion.

The debugger

For anything that half works: a formula returning the wrong numbers for some rows and not others, a filter that keeps dropping records, an automation that fires twice. The magic is in the second half of the question, which asks what you misunderstood rather than what is broken, so you get the cause instead of a patch. This is the wording from the original test, kept as it was written.

Tell me what's wrong with this and what I probably misunderstood when I wrote it:

[paste the formula, the query, or the step that keeps breaking]

Here is the context: [what it is meant to do, and what is happening instead]. Start with the one thing that is actually broken, in plain language, then explain the assumption I made that caused it. Give me the corrected version I can paste straight back in, and one line on what to check next time before I hit enter.

The summariser

For meeting notes, a call recap, a long article or the voice memo you made in the car. A plain summary hands you a shorter version of something you have already read, which saves nobody any time. Asking for posts alongside the insights turns the same paste into something you can publish this week.

Summarise this into 3 insights and 2 posts I could make from it:

[paste the notes, the transcript, the article or the recap]

The 3 insights should be things I would not have noticed by skimming, each written as one sentence I could say out loud. The 2 posts should each come with a hook line, the three points it would cover, and who it is for. Skip anything that is generic advice rather than something specific to what I pasted, and tell me if there is nothing in here worth posting.

The strategist

For the end of the month, when you have numbers and no plan. Most people ask for analysis and get a description of what already happened. Asking for ranked changes, with the expected result and how you would know it worked, turns the same data into next month's to-do list.

Here are last month's numbers: [paste the rows, or upload the export].

Tell me what is actually happening here, then give me the three changes that would move these numbers next month, ranked by how much difference they would make against how long they take. For each one, say what to change, what result to expect, and how I would know within two weeks whether it worked. Before you draw any conclusion, flag anything in the data that looks unreliable, like a missing week or a channel that only ran for two days.

The art director

For when you have one product photo and need a week of content out of it. This one hands back both the thinking and the thing to paste next: five different concepts, and the image prompt for each, so you are not staring at a blank composer trying to describe what you want.

Here is my product photo. My offer is [what it is, who it is for, the price].

Give me 5 ad concepts for it. For each one, write the shot (what is physically in frame), the line that appears on screen, and one sentence on why it would stop someone scrolling. Then give me the exact image prompt I would paste back to you to generate it. Make the five genuinely different from each other: one demonstration, one before and after, one comparison, one close-up detail, and one with a person using it.

The handover writer

For the process that lives only in your head. The phrasing is from the original test and the whole trick is the six months: it makes the writing assume nothing, which is exactly what your future self needs at 9pm when something breaks. It also quietly turns invisible work into a document with your name on it.

Write this up as if it's for a teammate who takes over in 6 months:

[paste your rough process notes, or describe the job step by step the way you would to a friend]

Keep it concise, human and practical. Include what triggers the task, the steps in order, where each file or login lives, the decisions I make along the way and the rule behind each one, plus the two or three things that usually go wrong and what to do about them. End with a short checklist they could run through without reading the whole document.

4 signs a prompt is worth saving

Proof

The original 50-prompt test and the five that survived it
VLOOKUP: approximate match is the default when you leave the last argument out
Images in ChatGPT: uploading a photo, editing it, and aspect ratios