Applying Brevity and Language Efficiency in Prompt Engineering

bushido

Very interesting read. What jumps out at me is a lot of this is still very task oriented. And each to their own, but anecdotally, I haven't seen great results from task oriented behavior. I don't mean that it does not produce what was asked for. I'm saying that tasks even when created by engineering and product teams are often wrong. I lean very heavily towards outcome based prompting. Say exactly what do you want achieved and then maybe give some constraints, ie. what definitely not to do. In my experiments, this has always produced much, much better results. Interestingly, it's less engineering and more customer focus.

wg0

Snake oil. Tell me something that has hard irrefutable and reproducible evidence.

Seb-C

A little bit more time and people might finally understand why we have formal deterministic languages, and we'll be back full circle to proper programming.

cocodill

Well a model is not your buddy, there is no need to chat with it.

mdrzn

"Premium models: GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro" TFA was written by an AI without even search access, or it would know that all those are OLD deprecated models. AI Slop. If the author doesn't even bother checking what his AI spit out, why would I read it? Useless article. I'm baffled that this reached the front page.

kusokurae

It still makes me laugh when i see "prompt engineering". I open articles posted on here that contain many diagrams and novel jargon, all for it to amount to using a fucking markdown file with some text in it.

hmokiguess

So, me think. Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

khalic

This is counterproductive, you can't reduce eloquence to a list of examples. Read good literature is still the best advise we can give here.

DarkNova6

Ironic. This article violates all rules that it intends to set out. It is easy to spot AI generated garbage.

Febriss33

i'm not a dev and surfing vibe coding. for me is not just a matter of brevity but a matter of clear scope instead. foggy but short prompt is far worste than clear but a little bit longer. just transfer a clear and bright idea, first set it up in your mind, well fixed with the infrastructure you are working with, than try to transfer it in the most direct way

josefritzishere

They want deterministic language for a non-deterministic algorithm. This focus area increasingly looking like a religious sect. I think AI wrote this post.

fittingopposite

Fairly long article for something about brevity... Didn't have the time to read it /s