Hacker News Reader

Comment by VladimirGolovin | Hacker News Reader

I must admit that I have a slight FOMO over prompt engineering. I'm pretty decent at verbalizing ideas and concepts for external consumption, and my experience with ChatGPT 4 has been excellent so far, but I still feel that I'm missing something.

Could you summarize the essence of the prpompting skill in a couple of sentences? Are there concepts that are critical to learn and master (e.g. 'chain of thought', etc.)?

View on HN

You write requirements and your expectations and make the model match your expectations. Until you have clear expectations of what you want from it, prompting LLM is pretty useless. It cannot do highly specific task because those are limited in the original training corpus too. However, for more generic task, it has seen most of the stuff out there, so it should be good enough. Having clarity on your problem is the key.

You have to make sure to couple chain of thought with branching, analysis and evaluation, then you can get pretty good results.

Sounds like what a Product Owner is supposed to do

>> You write requirements and your expectations and make the model match your expectations.

>> have clear expectations

This is exactly what I do all day, for about 20 years already, so I think I've got this covered. Where do I go from here?

You can now read new papers and follow ups from the community! It is really useful. You already know chain of thoughts. So you are on a good track!

Try to use these LLMs to automate more of the mundane tasks. Like scripting in bash, compiling videos, converting documents, refactoring data, transpiling code, transcribing code, etc. You will begin to see what works and what doesn't!

At the same time try to come with fun challenges for yourself to fool it. That will aid in learning ways to make it more obedient to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com