PICSE
Persona · Intention · Criteria · Sources · Examples — The UK Government’s framework, and the only one here with both source material and worked examples as required slots.
Use it for
Multi-stage knowledge work grounded in real documents — a policy option appraisal, a procurement evaluation, a consultation plan — where you have source material and prior examples of good output.
Avoid it for
Quick one-line tasks. Filling five slots to reformat a paragraph is pure overhead, and the guidance itself says a simple task needs only a clear instruction.
The slots
Each letter is a question the prompt has to answer.Persona
Whose expertise should the model borrow?
Name a job title plus the specialism, not just a seniority label.
Example: You are a credit control manager in a mid-sized construction firm with expertise in late-payment legislation.
Intention
What are you trying to achieve, and by what method?
State the outcome and the approach, not just the deliverable.
Example: Draft a three-stage escalation sequence for invoices overdue by 30, 60 and 90 days, escalating in tone without threatening legal action before stage three.
Criteria
What must be true of the output for it to be usable?
Measurable constraints: length, tone, format, must-haves. This slot carries a lot, so be explicit about each.
Example: Each letter under 200 words, firm but non-adversarial, and every one must cite the statutory interest rate.
Sources
What must it work from rather than invent?
List or attach the specific documents, and say explicitly not to go beyond them.
Example: Use only our attached standard payment terms and the late-payment legislation summary — do not cite any other legislation.
Examples Optional
What does a good answer look like?
Paste one or two real past outputs, ideally including a borderline case.
Example: Here are two stage-one letters we sent last quarter that recovered payment without escalation — match their register.
Strengths
- The only common framework that forces you to name your sources, which is the single biggest lever against invented answers in business use.
- Government provenance with a maintained, stable URL, which is rare: most prompt frameworks live on someone’s blog.
- The Examples slot smuggles few-shot prompting into a beginner-friendly mnemonic without ever using the jargon.
Weaknesses
- Three of its five slots — Persona, Intention, Criteria — are restatements of Role, Task and Format, so roughly 60% of it duplicates RTF.
- Criteria is overloaded: the guidance uses it for length, tone and format at once, which is three different decisions in one slot.
- It has no iteration or evaluation step despite being presented for iterative work; the iteration lives elsewhere in the guidance, not in the acronym.
Sources and grounding
- 1Experiment with promptsUK Government AI Knowledge Hub (DSIT)PICSE in full, with a worked departmental example. The same page also teaches RACE and GCSE.
- 2About the AI Knowledge HubUK Government (DSIT)Confirms the publisher is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.