Random thoughts about prompting, context windows, compression, and working with AI. You want it to do something you have in mind, and you know how/what to do, or sometimes you don’t. Now there are 3 options: you tell it everything down to the details, every specific thing.

Or you just tell it to do something at a high level and expect the thing to understand. Or you can go the middle way. I feel this is the go-to way, explaining the important parts that you think might be difficult for it.

You can feed it examples. It’s a faster way to do things, but it depends on the example being close to what you want. All of these are time-consuming.

Some you spend time before giving to AI, some after. A common pattern is easy for LLMs to implement, considering they must have seen it before in their training set, for example implementing user auth. A new problem you’re imagining or telling it is of course bia… (trimmed to ~200 words).