My shell prompt used to be a peacock. Two lines, every powerline glyph going, battery percentage, the time, my username on a machine where I am the only user. It looked magnificent in screenshots and told me almost nothing I actually needed while working.
So I stripped it back to the four things I genuinely glance at. The current directory, shortened so a deep path doesn't shove the cursor off the right edge. The git branch, but only when I'm in a repo, and coloured red the moment the working tree is dirty so I can't pretend I committed when I didn't. The exit code of the last command, but only when it's non-zero, because a quiet prompt means everything's fine and a number means go and read the error. And which Kubernetes context I'm pointed at, because the day you run a command against prod thinking it's staging is the day you wish your prompt had shouted.
Everything else went. The clock is in the corner of my screen. The hostname matters over SSH and nowhere else, so it only appears there. I switched to starship to wire this up because the config is one readable TOML file rather than a shell script I'd be afraid to touch in a year.
The test for anything in a prompt is simple. Does its absence ever cost you, or its presence ever save you? If the honest answer to both is no, it's decoration. Decoration is fine on a desktop. It has no business between me and the next command.