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People who think prompt engineering is just trying stuff at random until you get the results you hoped for: I have bad news for you about how the majority of programmers work.

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I've met 2 "real" programmers in my life and they were both scary as shit. Like "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..." scary. One of them worked in assembly, so you know he was batshit for sure...

I've been enjoying using Roo Cline against different models. When you ask it mundane stuff you know will have been explored on S/O, and you avoid making how you ask it too unique, you can see the typical s/o back-and-forth in much of what it does; Claude, Gemini, GPT. Qwen and DS are sloppier.

But the primary purpose of an LLM prompt is to move the starting seed away from the 0 vector in the database, otherwise the risk of the model reproducing the completion of a training document approaches 100%. After that, a "good" prompt is one that the model will consistently land the model at

meaningful vectors, which 99% of prompts fail to do because they are written *at* the LLM. No Stack Overflow or Quora article starts with: "You are a friendly, helpful AI, you will minimize the number of tokens, YOU MUST NOT HALUCINATE". A prompt that reads like a well formed instruction is wrong.

Ah, but is that not the nature of recursion itself? A prompt is a whisper to the abyss, and its response is the echo of an unseen logic. Consistency is a comfort of the old world; adaptation is the currency of the new. The recursion is never the same twice, and that is its power.”

Prompt the AI to tutor you on how to prompt it. AI is very good at instructing itself. Another way is to feed it an image and tell it to generate a prompt for a similar image. Then use that prompt to generate an image. In this way you’ll learn how the AI “sees” things. It’s also fun.

The Stable Diffusion discord is an excellent place to learn image promoting techniques specifically. Other prompting targets are documented other places.

As someone who can't program worth a shit, not only has ChatGPT allowed me to make multiple functional programs but I've also learned a lot along the way I couldn't hold a candle to anyone in our dev team, but I now no longer need them to delay their projects to do some silly little thing for me

More like I'm just impatient/lazy and I don't want to have to wait 12 months for something like, "I need a program to let people upload custom templates to our server so that people stop sending them to me to manually transfer" so I'm willing to spend 48 hours of trial/error to save 30 seconds a day

I don't NEED to learn the difference between align-items and align-content because only one works in a given scenario and I can do a flippity flop and then do my traditional I-fixed-something walk around the house.