A small thing, but I found the author's project-organization practices useful – creating individual .prompt files for system prompt, background information, and auxiliary instructions [1], and then running it through `llm`. It reveals how good LLM use, like any other engineering tool, requires good engineering thinking – methodical, and oriented around thoughtful specifications that balance design constraints – for b…
How do we benchmark these different methodologies? It all seems like vibes-based incantations. "You are an expert at finding vulnerabilities." "Please report only real vulnerabilities, not any false positives." Organizing things with made-up HTML tags because the models seem to like that for some reason. Where does engineering come into it?
I use these prompts everywhere. I get significantly better results mostly because it encourages backtracking and if I were to guess, enforces a higher confidence threshold before acting.
The expert engineering ones usually end up creating mountains of slop, refactoring things, and touching a bunch of code it has no business messing with.
I also have used lazy prompts: "You are positively allergic to rewriting anything that already exists. You have multiple mcps at your disposal to look for existing solutions and thoroughly read their documentation, bug reports, and git history. You really strongly prefer finding appropriate libraries instead of maintaining your own code"