Used to spend 3 hours tweaking ChatGPT prompts like a poet, now I just type 'make it shorter' and it works better.

Switched last month when I watched a coworker get better results in 10 seconds by literally typing 'fix this' into Claude, has anyone else noticed simpler prompts just work way better?

3 comments

3 Comments

joel_jones8d ago

Oh man, are we really acting like prompt engineering is some deep philosophical debate now? I literally just ask my AI stuff the same way I'd ask a distracted intern and it works fine. "Fix this" is basically all I use too, sometimes "make it sound less like a robot." I think people get way too precious about their carefully crafted prompts when the dumb ones work exactly the same. You could probably just grunt at the thing and it'd get the gist.

laura_schmidt827d ago

Ha, seriously. I had a friend who spent two hours crafting the perfect prompt for a travel itinerary, like paragraphs of context and tone requirements. I just typed "plan a cheap trip to Portugal" and got basically the same thing. It's almost funny how much we overthink this stuff. I remember one time I accidentally left a typo in a prompt, typed "crreate a poem" instead of "create," and the AI still wrote me a sonnet about autumn. They're smarter than we give them credit for, honestly.

lilya766d ago

Hold on, you accidentally typed "crreate" and it wrote a sonnet? That's wild I gotta try that.