The APE Framework (Action, Purpose, Expectation)

TL;DR: APE is Action, Purpose, Expectation — a three-slot prompt structure with no role and no context. Action names the job, Purpose states why you're asking, Expectation describes the outcome. It's the smallest framework in this cluster with a dedicated "why" slot, which makes it the right tool exactly when a persona would add nothing but the reason behind the request would change everything.

What Is the APE Framework?

APE is a three-part prompt structure: Action, Purpose, Expectation. You state what to do, why you're asking, and what the finished answer should look like.

That's the entire framework. No role, no audience, no tone, no context field, no slot for examples. Where RTF opens by naming who the model should be and CO-STAR spends three of its six slots on tone, audience, and style, APE spends its one non-obvious slot on something none of those frameworks name directly: the reason the task exists in the first place.

That trade only pays off in a specific situation, and it's worth stating up front rather than after fourteen paragraphs of praise. APE is for tasks where nobody but you reads the output, no persona would change the answer, and the same request means genuinely different things depending on why you're making it. A request to "summarize this" for a decision you have to make by Friday and the identical request to "summarize this" for a LinkedIn teaser are the same Action and produce completely different useful summaries. Purpose is the only slot in this entire framework family that names that difference directly.

Who Actually Coined APE, and Is It the Same as OpenAI's "Automatic Prompt Engineer"?

We could not find a source earlier than a LinkedIn Pulse article by Edi Hezri Hairi, titled "9 Frameworks to master ChatGPT Prompt Engineering" and published 3 August 2023 (linkedin.com, accessed 3 September 2026). APE is listed first, ahead of RACE, COAST, TAG, and five others in the same post. The article's own wording is:

"APE: Action, Purpose, Expectation"

"Action: Define the job or activity to be done." "Purpose: Discuss the intention or goal." "Expectation: State the desired outcome."

The article names no earlier author and no other source for APE specifically. We searched for an earlier public appearance of the exact three-word expansion and did not find one. That is a genuinely different claim from "Hairi invented it": the article reads like a compiled list of nine mnemonics already circulating in prompt-engineering circles in mid-2023, not like an origin story, and it does not claim to be one. If an earlier source exists, we did not find it, and we are saying so rather than picking a name to credit.

What Does Each Letter Mean, and Why Does Purpose Do More Work Than It Looks Like?

Action and Expectation are familiar. Every framework in this cluster has some version of "what to do" and "how to shape it back": RTF's Task and Format, RACE's Action and Expectation, CO-STAR's Objective and Response. Purpose is the one that's actually distinctive, and it's easy to undersell because on paper it looks like a soft, optional nice-to-have.

It isn't. Purpose is the only slot in APE, and the only slot in any of the compact frameworks we've covered, that names the reason behind the request rather than the request itself or its shape. A Role tells the model who's answering. Purpose tells it why the answer matters, which changes what counts as a good answer far more than most people expect from three words.

How Do You Build an APE Prompt, Slot by Slot?

Start from a genuinely weak prompt and add one component at a time. Watch what changes when only Purpose moves and everything else stays close to fixed.

Weak, no framework at all:

Summarize this article for me.

This works, technically, the way any bare request works: you get a generic, defensible summary that could have been written for anyone.

+ Action, made specific:

Action: Summarize the article below on vendor contract terms.

Barely different from the weak version yet, because "summarize" was already the whole ask. Action mostly matters when the original request was vague about the task itself, and here it isn't, so this step does little. That's expected, and it sets up why the next step matters more.

+ Purpose, version one:

Action: Summarize the article below on vendor contract terms.
Purpose: I'm deciding whether to renew this vendor before Friday's budget
meeting, and I need to know if anything in the terms changed enough to matter.

+ Expectation, completing version one:

Action: Summarize the article below on vendor contract terms.
Purpose: I'm deciding whether to renew this vendor before Friday's budget
meeting, and I need to know if anything in the terms changed enough to matter.
Expectation: Three bullet points. Each names one specific change and why it
affects the renewal decision. Under 100 words total. If nothing material
changed, say so in one line instead of padding to three bullets.

[paste article]

Now hold Action and the length constraint roughly fixed and change only Purpose:

+ Purpose, version two — same Action, different reason:

Action: Summarize the article below on vendor contract terms.
Purpose: I want a short, shareable teaser to post on our company LinkedIn page.
Expectation: Two sentences, casual tone, one specific number or fact from the
article, ending with a question. Under 50 words.

[paste article]

Same article, same opening verb, wildly different output. Version one surfaces risk and cost details a budget decision needs and ignores everything that isn't decision-relevant. Version two surfaces the single most shareable fact and ignores the contract terms almost entirely. Nothing about the Action changed. Purpose is the whole reason the two summaries look nothing alike, and that's the proof this framework is actually asking you to think, not just fill in a template.

Where Does APE Run Out?

At exactly the things it deliberately left out: role, audience, tone, and examples.

No role. APE has nothing equivalent to RTF's Role or CO-STAR's Audience. If the answer needs to sound like a specific kind of expert, or if who's reading it changes what "good" means, APE gives you nowhere to say so. You can fold a role into Action ("act as a support lead and draft a reply"), but at that point you're borrowing RTF's idea, not using APE's.

No context. There's no slot for background the model needs but you haven't stated: the situation, the constraints, the history. Purpose sometimes absorbs a little of this, but it's answering "why," not "what do you need to know." For anything with real background to convey, that gap shows up fast.

No examples. Like RTF, RACE, and CO-STAR, APE has nothing resembling CRISPE's Experiment slot or classic few-shot prompting. If describing the shape you want is harder than showing it, none of these three slots will get you there.

When Does APE Beat RTF, RACE, CO-STAR, or AUTOMAT?

When a persona is genuinely inert and the reason behind the ask genuinely isn't. That's a narrower situation than "quick prompt," and it's worth being precise about it rather than claiming APE for everything RTF already covers well.

Put plainly: reach for RTF or RACE the moment a role would sharpen the answer, whether that's a specific expertise or a specific vocabulary. RACE's own breakdown of its origin actually surfaces APE directly: it comes from the same August 2023 nine-framework list, sitting one slot ahead of RACE in the same post. Reach for CO-STAR the moment someone other than you is reading the output and their expectations matter. Reach for APE when neither of those is true, but the same request would get you a worse answer if the model didn't know why you're asking. For the wider set including CRAFT, CARE, and Chain-of-Thought, our roundup of prompt frameworks covers the rest side by side.

Do You Need to Learn Every Prompt Framework?

No, and this is worth saying plainly rather than pretending every acronym in this cluster earns a permanent spot in your head. Most of these frameworks solve the same handful of problems (name the task, give it shape, decide who's talking) in slightly different words. APE's Purpose slot is a genuine exception; the rest of its territory overlaps heavily with RTF and RACE.

A reader who has internalized one compact framework well, really internalized it, not just memorized the letters, writes better prompts than one who has skimmed six and forgotten which one has the audience slot. Learn APE if your work is mostly personal, single-reader tasks where the "why" keeps changing the right answer. Learn RTF if it doesn't. Either one, used consistently, beats the collector's approach of knowing all nine names from the same listicle and reaching for none of them under deadline.

16 Copy-Paste APE Prompts

Every one below fills all three slots with something specific. Swap the bracketed details and run as written.

Email, declining a meeting

Action: Write a reply declining this recurring meeting invite.
Purpose: I want out of a standing call that no longer needs me, without it
reading as a snub to whoever scheduled it.
Expectation: Under 80 words. Offer to review notes async instead of attending.
No apology in the opening line.

Code, explaining a function to a teammate

Action: Explain what the function below does.
Purpose: A teammate is about to modify it and needs to understand the
concurrency assumption before they touch it, not just what it returns.
Expectation: Three sentences max, plain language, name the one assumption
that would break if changed. No line-by-line walkthrough.

[paste function]

Blog outline

Action: Outline a post targeting the query "[target query]".
Purpose: I need this to rank, so the outline has to answer what a searcher
actually needs, in the order they'd need it, not just list subtopics.
Expectation: H2-level outline only, one line per section stating what it
answers. No full sentences, no intro paragraph yet.

Customer support reply

Action: Reply to the customer message below.
Purpose: This customer has churned once before over a slow response; the
goal here is speed and clarity, not a perfect resolution in one message.
Expectation: Under 100 words. Acknowledge the issue, give one concrete next
step, no hedge language.

[paste message]

Meeting notes to summary

Action: Turn the meeting transcript below into a summary.
Purpose: This goes to two people who missed the call and need to know what
was decided, not the discussion that led there.
Expectation: Two sections only — Decisions and Open Questions. No narrative
recap of who said what.

[paste transcript]

Resume bullet rewrite

Action: Rewrite the bullet points below.
Purpose: I'm applying to a smaller company that cares about ownership, not
the enterprise scale I usually lead with.
Expectation: Same number of bullets, each under 20 words, lead with the
outcome rather than the tool used.

[paste bullets]

Social post, LinkedIn

Action: Turn the update below into a LinkedIn post.
Purpose: I want it to read as a genuine lesson learned, not an announcement,
because our audience is skeptical of founder wins.
Expectation: Under 130 words, first person, ends with a question, no
hashtags.

Investor update

Action: Draft this month's investor update from the numbers below.
Purpose: Churn rose and I need investors to trust the update because I led
with the bad number, not because I hid it well.
Expectation: Metrics first, then what changed, then the one thing I'm doing
about it. Under 350 words.

[paste numbers]

Research question refinement

Action: Turn the vague topic below into three specific research questions.
Purpose: I have to defend one of these to an advisor next week and need
questions that are actually answerable with available data, not just
interesting.
Expectation: Three questions, each one sentence, each naming what data would
answer it.

[paste topic]

Product description

Action: Write a description for [product].
Purpose: This is for a comparison page where the reader already has two
other tabs open, so the goal is differentiation, not persuasion from zero.
Expectation: One sentence naming the one thing we do differently, then two
supporting bullets. 60 words max.

Job description intro

Action: Write the opening paragraph of a job posting for [role].
Purpose: Our last two hires from this posting expected a bigger company than
we are; the purpose here is honest filtering, not maximum applicants.
Expectation: Three sentences. State the team size and remote policy plainly
in the first sentence.

Cold outreach follow-up

Action: Write a follow-up email to a prospect who opened but didn't reply.
Purpose: I don't want this to read as a nudge for a reply — the actual goal
is to give them one new reason to care, or let it die gracefully.
Expectation: Under 70 words. One new piece of information. End with a
low-commitment question, not "just checking in."

Documentation section

Action: Write a troubleshooting section for the error below.
Purpose: Support gets the same ticket every week for this; the purpose is
deflecting tickets, not documenting completeness.
Expectation: Numbered steps, each one action, each stating what the user
should see afterward. Under 150 words.

[paste error and cause]

Personal, weekly review

Action: Turn my rough notes below into a weekly review.
Purpose: This is for me, next Monday, to remember what actually mattered
this week — not a polished summary anyone else will read.
Expectation: Three lines max. What moved forward, what didn't, one thing to
change next week.

[paste notes]

Presentation opening line

Action: Write the opening line of a talk on [topic].
Purpose: The audience has heard the standard version of this pitch before;
the purpose is to earn attention in the first sentence, not to introduce
the topic.
Expectation: One sentence, no rhetorical question, no statistic without
immediate context for why it matters.

Apology, internal

Action: Write a message to the team about the missed deadline below.
Purpose: I want to own the miss clearly enough that nobody has to ask
follow-up questions about who's accountable, without turning it into a
long confession.
Expectation: Under 120 words. State what happened, what changes, one
sentence of accountability, no over-apologizing.

[paste details]

Is This What Prompt Architects' Enhance Feature Does?

Not literally (nothing runs an "APE checklist" under the hood), but the instinct is the same one this whole framework is built on: a request without its reason attached gets a generic answer, and stating the reason is cheap compared to rewriting the output afterward. Prompt Architects' Enhance feature structures a raw prompt into role, task, format, constraints, and tone automatically; APE is what doing a narrower version of that by hand looks like, with "why" made explicit instead of left for the model to guess.

Where a tool actually helps is the part APE alone won't fix: remembering to state Purpose at all, every time, across the dozens of quick prompts you write in a week. Every plan, including the free one, runs on built-in AI with no API key required, and the published free tier is 5 prompt enhancements per day according to our FAQ page. What it won't do is know why you're asking. That's still the one line only you can write, and it's the entire reason APE's second letter exists.