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> But there is more: a key thing with LLMs is that their ability to help, as a tool, changes vastly based on your communication ability. The prompt is the king

> But there is more: a key thing with LLMs is that their ability to help, as a tool, changes vastly based on your communication ability. The prompt is the king to make those models 10x better than they are with the lazy one-liner question. People keep saying this, and there are use cases for which this is definitely the case, but I find the opposite to be just as true in some circumstances. I'm surprised at how good LLMs are at answering "me be monkey, me have big problem with code" questions. For simple one-offs like "how to do x in Pandas" (a frequent one for me), I often just give Claude a mish-mash of keywords, and it usually figures out what I want. An example prompt of mine from yesterday, which Claude successfully answered, was "python sha256 of file contents base64 safe for fs path." With a system prompt to make Claude's output super brief and a command to execute queries from the terminal via Simon Willison's LLM tool, this is extremely useful.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Using the correct keywords like you did is part of communication though. Good communication with LLMs is the least keywords used to make it deducible for LLM what you exactly want.
- EagnaIonat 2y ago
  > Good communication with LLMs is the least keywords used to make it deducible for LLM what you exactly want. I am not sure that is the case, at least with a large number of LLMs. CO-STAR and TIDD-EC are much about structure and explanation than brevity.
  - freehorse 2y ago
    Finding what works for an llm and what not is also part of communication skills. Though I do not have a good idea what is _bad_ communication with an llm. People say that sometimes, but when specific examples arise I do not see really anything more than limitations of llms (and the improvements they often suggest do not do anything either). So it would be good to have some more concrete examples, unless that is about inability to communicate a problem in general, stemming from actual inability to _understand_ the problem. Also a lot change in time, I think in the past one had to really coddle an llm "You are the best expert in python in the world!" but I am not sure that is that important nowadays.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      Bad communication => being too ambiguous, expecting LLM to understand you through that ambiguity and then not being satisfied when it didn't. Bad communication: "My webapp doesn't work" Good communication: "Nextjs, [pasted error]" Bad communication is giving irrelevant information, or being too ambiguous, not providing enough or correct detail. Then another example of good communication and efficiency in my view is for example "ts, fn leftpad, no text, code only". I myself can understand what it means when someone was to prompt it and LLM can understand such query for all domains. Although if I was using Copilot I would just write the bare minimum to trigger the auto complete I want so const leftPad = is probably enough.

mewpmewp2 2y ago

Using the correct keywords like you did is part of communication though. Good communication with LLMs is the least keywords used to make it deducible for LLM what you exactly want.

EagnaIonat 2y ago
> Good communication with LLMs is the least keywords used to make it deducible for LLM what you exactly want. I am not sure that is the case, at least with a large number of LLMs. CO-STAR and TIDD-EC are much about structure and explanation than brevity.
- freehorse 2y ago
  Finding what works for an llm and what not is also part of communication skills. Though I do not have a good idea what is _bad_ communication with an llm. People say that sometimes, but when specific examples arise I do not see really anything more than limitations of llms (and the improvements they often suggest do not do anything either). So it would be good to have some more concrete examples, unless that is about inability to communicate a problem in general, stemming from actual inability to _understand_ the problem. Also a lot change in time, I think in the past one had to really coddle an llm "You are the best expert in python in the world!" but I am not sure that is that important nowadays.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Bad communication => being too ambiguous, expecting LLM to understand you through that ambiguity and then not being satisfied when it didn't. Bad communication: "My webapp doesn't work" Good communication: "Nextjs, [pasted error]" Bad communication is giving irrelevant information, or being too ambiguous, not providing enough or correct detail. Then another example of good communication and efficiency in my view is for example "ts, fn leftpad, no text, code only". I myself can understand what it means when someone was to prompt it and LLM can understand such query for all domains. Although if I was using Copilot I would just write the bare minimum to trigger the auto complete I want so const leftPad = is probably enough.