A Complete Guide to Meta Prompting
prompthub.us
prompthub.us
I personally reject advice that is muddled with directly offering their own services: Its conflict of interest in my face.
Most websites in your search results are using SEO to trick you there, give you a slither of information then try to shell you their shit.
Google might be at the helm of the web's death journy to hell, but corporations and merchants are the crew onboard.
an example seed: "create a prompt for an agent that will help me reduce prompt token usage and speed up results without losing necessary complexity. can you build a prompt that I use to this end?"
After a bunch of recursive prompting:
"Optimize the provided 'Original Prompt' into an 'Optimized Prompt'.
The 'Optimized Prompt' must:
- Be token-efficient. - Be maximally clear, precise, unambiguous, with direct instructions. - Be ideal for advanced AI model processing. - Preserve the 'Original Prompt's' core intent and task. - Retain 'Original Prompt's' details, nuances, analytical requirements, output formats, and complexity, without oversimplification.
Apply this optimization method:
1. From 'Original Prompt', eliminate: conversational filler, redundancy, pleasantries, self-references. 2. Use: strong, direct action verbs. 3. Be: specific, direct. Replace vague terms with precise equivalents. 4. Clearly state: task, context, constraints, output format. Explicitly define implied formats (e.g., list, JSON, steps). 5. Logically group related instructions. 6. Ensure 'Optimized Prompt' is a direct command."
It's brutishly simple, but part of the (imho self evident) process is editing the prompts as you continue to feed it back in on itself.
But I agree it’s not engineering. I love engineering, but if could go back to school it’d be for an English degree.
to arrange cleverly and often secretly for something to happen, especially something that is to your advantage
or
skilfully arrange for (something) to occur
or
to contrive or plan out, usually with more or less subtle skill and craft
(from various dictionaries)
This is the sense in which terms like “social engineering” and “prompt engineering” are meant, and it’s a perfectly fine and correct use of the word.
Garbage in, garbage out - GIGO - still seems to apply to LLMs. It might be nice if LLMs would respond with 'this prompt doesn't compile, try again' while emitting an error report, like compilers do, if some minimal standard wasn't met.
It'll be fortunate if that turns out to be a major industry skill!
Even if you're 100% accurate that the advent of LLMs means that the field of software engineering has effectively devolved into prompt engineering and AI-wrangling, that is a change that we should fight with full-throated, actual-Luddite levels of defense. Your own analogy – the way a tiny, tiny core of 'real' engineers develop game engines, and then the entire field of game development just 'scripts' those engines – sends up a ton of red flags for me.
(Aside: as an erstwhile game developer 'just scripting game engines' is...underselling the craft of programming in game development, but whatever).
For a long time game development has been a weird shadow version of the rest of the tech industry. We're influenced by the same macro trends (e.g. ZIRP, VC fads) and the mood and zeitgeist generally rhyme as a result. But if you look at the drive to unionise game developers vs. same impulse in the mainstream tech industry the feeling is COMPLETELY different.
What's the incentive to unionise if you're a SWE at Meta, Palantir, or Google? Your job is pretty great, your work-life balance is at least not fundamentally out of control, and your STARTING salary puts you in the top 10% of US households. It is probably the last remaining holdout of the 1970s upper-middle-class dream jobs.
And if you're the equivalent engineer at EA, Activision, or Ubisoft? You can expect seasonal layoffs, a good work-life balance means you sleep at home instead of under your desk at least once a week, and your take-home pay is just sufficient to let you split the rent on an outer LA apartment that's just inside tolerable commuting range. Equity? What's that? Management treats you like a disposable cog AND BRAGS ABOUT IT, like they have for the last thirty years.
This is what we want to become? This is the future we're embracing?
Vastly underselling the effort that goes into engine development.
Heck, vastly underselling the relationship between coders and level/game designers.
Not everything is always achievable in script. There's usually an ongoing conversation, level designers requesting new features.
Not to mention most of these pipelines are unique and sometimes proprietary.
Look at Star Citizen. Every man and his dog was screaming at them, that they couldn't deliver space game positioning precision with 32 bit floating point. They spent serious bank redeveloping crytek to take 64 bit floating point, trashed that and moved to Unreal.
We aren't in some kind of Post-Coding world when it comes to game development.
And really, I don't see prompts taking a scripting position in regular software development either. Scripts aren't compiled but they are a heck of a lot more deterministic.
>People that know how to design innovative and practical prompt solutions are going to be quite valuable.
Yeah the remaining fact in your hot take isnt that hot at all.
Arguably they chose the wrong engine to start with. SC is also a textbook example of scope creep, seeing as how it hasn't had a production quality release in over a decade.
And yeah the scope creep is insane. If they had just donated the money to smaller, leaner projects the number of excellent games we would have right now would be huge. But one massive barge of money against one project has basically killed the project.
To stay with the video game analogy: modern tooling, engines, etc have radically simplified game development. What took a team of 10 people six months in the early 90s can now be done better by two people in six weeks. Yet games now employ more developers, take longer to develop, and there are far more games being developed.