alt Hacker NewsPrompting is definitely a skill, similar to "googling" in the mid 00's.
You see people complaining about LLM ability, and then you see their prompt, and it's the 2006 equivalent of googling "I need to know where I can go for getting the fastest service for car washes in Toronto that does wheel washing too"
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Communication is definitely a skill, and most people suck at it in general. And frequently poor communication is a direct result from the fact that we don't ourselves know what we want. We dream of a genie that not only frees us from having to communicate well, but of having to think properly. Because thinking is hard and often inconvenient. But LLMs aren't going to entirely free us from the fact that if garbage goes in, garbage will come out.
"Communication usually fails, except by accident." —Osmo A. Wiio [1]
I’ve been looking for tooling that would evaluate my prompt and give feedback on how to improve. I can get somewhere with custom system prompts (“before responding ensure…”) but it seems like someone is probably already working on this? Ideally it would run outside the actual thread to keep context clean. There are some options popping up on Google but curious if anyone has a first anecdote to share?
Ironically, the phrase that was a bad 2006 google query is a decent enough LLM prompt, and the good 2006 google query (keywords only) would be a bad LLM prompt.