Comment by ttoinou
10 months ago
Side topic : I didn’t see a serious article about prompt engineering for senior software development pop up on HN. Yet a lot of users here have their own techniques unshared with others
10 months ago
Side topic : I didn’t see a serious article about prompt engineering for senior software development pop up on HN. Yet a lot of users here have their own techniques unshared with others
It's maddening to me how little good writing there is out there on effective prompting.
Here's an example: what's the best prompt to use to summarize an article?
That feels like such an obvious thing, and yet I haven't even seen that being well explored.
It's actually a surprisingly deep topic. I like using tricks like "directly quote the sentences that best illustrate the overall themes" and "identify the most surprising ideas", but I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of all the tricks I haven't seen yet.
This whitepaper is the best I've found so far, at least for covering general prompting techniques.
https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineering
This comment has some advice from Simon Willison on this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897666
Maybe you should ask him. lol
It seems a little counterintuitive, but you can ask an LLM to improve a prompt. They are quite good at it.
Github (Marketplace) shipped a little ui to -improve- prompts here on their new AI marketplace https://github.com/marketplace
I was just listening to Simon Willison on Software Misadventures,[0, 1] and he said the best resource he knows of is Anthropic's guide to prompt engineering.[2]
[0] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/simon-willison-llm-weird...
[1] https://youtu.be/6U_Zk_PZ6Kg?feature=shared&t=56m29 (the exact moment)
[2] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
Anthropic prompt engineering video (Sep 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aRN5JkmL8
An unfortunate casualty of the importantance of prompt engineering is that there is less of an incentive to share good prompts publicly.
You can read all of the prompts in Plandex (open source CLI coding agent focusing on larger projects): https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/tree/main/app/server/m...
They're pretty long and extensive, and honestly could use some cleaning up and refactoring at this point, but they are being used heavily in production and work quite well, which took a fairly extreme amount of trial-and-error to achieve.