Tagged prompt-engineering
6 essays
- Context engineering is the design surface Prompt engineering is about picking the right words. The bigger question in production is what goes into the context window at all, and what each step is allowed to see. That's the part that decides whether the thing works.
- Stop micromanaging your AI Re-explaining your situation at the start of every chat is the same as briefing a new contractor every morning. The fix is boring: write the context down once, somewhere the model can always see it.
- Chain of thought, and where it breaks Telling a model to work through a problem step by step does make it more accurate. Nobody mentions the second half, which is that you usually don't want your users to see any of that working.
- Prompt chaining: split the work, raise the floor One big prompt that does five things will fail somewhere in the middle and you won't know where. Five prompts that do one thing each cost more to run and are far easier to fix.
- Simple prompting: less magic, more method There are no magic words. After a few thousand prompts in production, everything that reliably helped came down to three things, and all three are just being clear about what you want.
- Prompting with frameworks the model already knows Name a framework the model has already read a thousand times, like a SWOT or a user journey map, and you don't have to explain the steps. It fills in the shape and you spend your words on the actual problem.