Comment by SyneRyder

I'll admit the parallels are vague, and I may be unhelpfully throwing people off on a side quest there. At least you'll understand my reasons for being vague, and how telling someone "the answer" actually prevents the learning. The "aha" moment is the important mental shift.

What I was thinking of here - if you remember the statue near the mountain, and it reaches out. There's also other statues in the area. But somewhere around that area, there are also trees. And if you look at the trees from the right place... the statues, the trees, they're doing the same thing. Why are trees doing the same thing?! Pondering that led in interesting directions.

The Witness was so multilayered, in ways that unexpectedly rewired my mind. My suggestion is that the rewiring that can occur from The Witness, is also a useful mental shift when interacting with AI. I think many of the people I see going fastest and most fluidly with AI have had that mental shift.

On a different note, where I can be more direct. Prompting is not just "the prompt". The entire environment is the prompt. Everything about the folder the AI finds itself in, adjacent files it's allowed to look at, everything it sees and encounters as it progresses, they each steer the model slightly. So where there used to be "prompt engineering" and "context engineering", there's also "environment engineering". The environment is the context.

And that perspective may bring you back to The Witness again.