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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 techni

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

deleted 1y ago
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mtlynch 1y ago
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-intern https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/simon-willison-llm-weird... [1] https://youtu.be/6U_Zk_PZ6Kg?feature=shared&t=56m29 https://youtu.be/6U_Zk_PZ6Kg?feature=shared&t=56m29 (the exact moment) [2] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
- walterbell 1y ago
  Anthropic prompt engineering video (Sep 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aRN5JkmL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aRN5JkmL8
minimaxir 1y ago
An unfortunate casualty of the importantance of prompt engineering is that there is less of an incentive to share good prompts publicly.
- danenania 1y ago
  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/model/prompts 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.
simonw 1y ago
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.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  This comment has some advice from Simon Willison on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897666 Maybe you should ask him. lol
  - deleted 1y ago
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- Gracana 1y ago
  This whitepaper is the best I've found so far, at least for covering general prompting techniques. https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineering https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineering
- jefflinwood 1y ago
  It seems a little counterintuitive, but you can ask an LLM to improve a prompt. They are quite good at it.
  - tough 1y ago
    Github (Marketplace) shipped a little ui to -improve- prompts here on their new AI marketplace https://github.com/marketplace https://github.com/marketplace
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mtlynch 1y ago

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-intern https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/simon-willison-llm-weird... [1] https://youtu.be/6U_Zk_PZ6Kg?feature=shared&t=56m29 https://youtu.be/6U_Zk_PZ6Kg?feature=shared&t=56m29 (the exact moment) [2] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...

walterbell 1y ago
Anthropic prompt engineering video (Sep 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aRN5JkmL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aRN5JkmL8

minimaxir 1y ago

An unfortunate casualty of the importantance of prompt engineering is that there is less of an incentive to share good prompts publicly.

danenania 1y ago
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/model/prompts 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.

simonw 1y ago

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.

jimbokun 1y ago
This comment has some advice from Simon Willison on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897666 Maybe you should ask him. lol
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Gracana 1y ago
This whitepaper is the best I've found so far, at least for covering general prompting techniques. https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineering https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineering
jefflinwood 1y ago
It seems a little counterintuitive, but you can ask an LLM to improve a prompt. They are quite good at it.
- tough 1y ago
  Github (Marketplace) shipped a little ui to -improve- prompts here on their new AI marketplace https://github.com/marketplace https://github.com/marketplace
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]