This was a great refresher on things I’ve seen writings of but never thought deeply about. A lot of it already “made sense” yet in my day to day I’m still doing the bad versions of the prompts.
Do you have preference n a more continual system like Claude Code for one big prompt or just trying to do one task and starting something new?
cobbzilla · 22m ago
This article has some solid general advice on prompt-writing for anyone, even though the examples are technical.
I found the “Big-O” analogy a bit strained & distracting, but still a good read.
alexc05 · 17m ago
I'll admit that it's a little shoehorned in at the end :)
... but you know how editors are with writing the headline for clicks against the wishes of the journalist writing the article. You'll always see Journos sayign stuff like "don't blame me, that's my editor, I don't write the headlines"
I did toy with the idea of going with something like:
`Prompt Engineering is a wrapper around Attention.`
But my editor overruled me *FOR THE CLICKS!!!*
Full disclosure: I'm also the editor
drfrankensearch · 6m ago
There’s a repeated paragraph in it atm you may want to fix:
“This is why prompt structure matters so much. The model isn’t reading your words like you do — it’s calculating relationships between all of them simultaneously. Where you place information, how you group concepts, and what comes first or last all influence which relationships get stronger weights.
This is why prompt structure matters so much. The model isn’t reading your words like you do — it’s calculating relationships between all of them simultaneously”
Reprimand the editor. ;)
I look forward to using the ideas in this, but would be much more excited if you could benchmark these concepts somehow, and provide regular updates about how to optimize.
esafak · 47m ago
Could you share an example with results so we can see what difference it made?
alexc05 · 22m ago
I can't republish anything that happens in a production/proprietary environment.
One of the things that I think is pretty great about being able to share these particular prompts is that you can run this on one of your own repos to see how it turns out.
ACTUALLY!! Hold on. A couple weekends ago I spent some time doing some underlying research with huggingface/transformers and I have it on a branch.
Do you have preference n a more continual system like Claude Code for one big prompt or just trying to do one task and starting something new?
I found the “Big-O” analogy a bit strained & distracting, but still a good read.
... but you know how editors are with writing the headline for clicks against the wishes of the journalist writing the article. You'll always see Journos sayign stuff like "don't blame me, that's my editor, I don't write the headlines"
I did toy with the idea of going with something like: `Prompt Engineering is a wrapper around Attention.`
But my editor overruled me *FOR THE CLICKS!!!*
Full disclosure: I'm also the editor
“This is why prompt structure matters so much. The model isn’t reading your words like you do — it’s calculating relationships between all of them simultaneously. Where you place information, how you group concepts, and what comes first or last all influence which relationships get stronger weights. This is why prompt structure matters so much. The model isn’t reading your words like you do — it’s calculating relationships between all of them simultaneously”
Reprimand the editor. ;)
I look forward to using the ideas in this, but would be much more excited if you could benchmark these concepts somehow, and provide regular updates about how to optimize.
One of the things that I think is pretty great about being able to share these particular prompts is that you can run this on one of your own repos to see how it turns out.
ACTUALLY!! Hold on. A couple weekends ago I spent some time doing some underlying research with huggingface/transformers and I have it on a branch.
https://github.com/AlexChesser/transformers/tree/personal/vi...
You can look at the results of an architectural research prompt.
Unfortunately I don't have a "good mode" side by side with a "bad mode" at the moment. I can work on that in the future.
The underlying research linked has the experimental design version of this with each piece evaluated in isolation.