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Good article. I've recently come to many of the same conclusions. It makes sense that the quality of the prompts matter because at the end of the day it's predicting the most likely next token. If you start out unskilled, it's unlikely your sentence will suddenly jump to brilliance.

But I could see some interesting tricks such as. "Pretend that I'm a young naive student and you are a master sharing your wisdom with me as I ask you questions" But even that might just align with some cheaply written fantasy fiction it consumed. Now if I use language like a PHDs white paper...

> But even that might just align with some cheaply written fantasy fiction it consumed. I'd expect a little Tolkien to surface, especially if you're asking questions about C.

This morning, I was wondering about doing the exact opposite of this! Basically, ask it to quit feigning expertise. I'm using it to refine some documentation / spec writing, so I want to see when I'm being vague or making assumptions. That way I can explain those parts better.

indeed, prompting is still extremely sensitive and brittle even today. Some of my colleagues @nilenso.com managed to get better code by just saying "write it like Rich Hickey would" which seemed to have activated the right neurons