“All this time I thought I needed to learn how to prompt the LLM, but it turns out I really just needed to learn how to prompt… myself”
Don't worry, I trust you won't need a barf bag for the rest of this post, just for the above.
I’ve been making unreasonably requests of LLMs, asking for feedback on topics like Career Strategy. That was never gonna work. Lousy replies are the result of lousy prompts; which are the result of (my) lousy problem framing.
No amount of “5 simple tricks to improve your prompts” or magic words was going to improve the responses. Unlike programming or mathematics problems, which engender highly specific methods of finding answers, with clear criteria of success. I have not been prompting LLMs with similarly specific methods or criteria.
It took brute force repetition for me to learn this[1].
The more and more I use LLMs, like Claude and ChatGPT, the more I notice how formulaic their responses are. They remind me, now, of common cads or flirtatious floozies, cooing tried and tested lines to every Tom, Dick, and Harriett (“this is significant, you’re picking up on a pattern few notice.”) Nah, they notice. They notice it, plenty.
The more and more I use LLMs, the less and less magical or conscious they appear. And the more and more useful the heuristic of “think of LLMs as a mirror” becomes. I now understand that the least important part of the process is the way I frame and word the prompt, rather the most important part is: how I frame the problem myself. Hence the trite analogy: how I “prompt” myself.
Embarrassingly, my prompts have been the equivalent of “Tell me how to make a lot of money” or “what does everybody vibe that I’m not seeing?” but, if the LLM is only a mirror[2], how can I reasonably expect it to give me anything more than a vague, broad, and totally unactionable answer? Alas, that is exactly what I was doing.
Could I have realized learned this without LLMs? Probably. I suspect that's what sage mentors or therapists are supposed to help illuminate.
I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here other than the interesting observation that the annoying self-reflective platitude is true. The good news is that at least I have some metric to tell me when I’m not thinking sufficiently detailed or methodically about a problem, which is some cause for help.
Wait you mean to say you needed to prompt an LLM like 150 times just to learn YOU were the problem? Shee-EEE-eesh. I just updated my P-Doom