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One unexpected discovery that I have made while building an AI-based system: the LLM's are bad at designing prompts. We tend to think that the AI has some sort
by mojuba 1mo ago
One unexpected discovery that I have made while building an AI-based system: the LLM's are bad at designing prompts.
We tend to think that the AI has some sort of self-knowledge and should be good at designing prompts for itself but it's really not.
Been struggling with a task that heavily depended on prompts, ended up rewriting all my prompts from scratch in my own words, and it finally worked. Then every time I ask Claude to fix something in the prompts, it invariably makes it worse.
A very strange phenomenon that can probably be explained by the quality of prompt design advice that made it to the training dataset. Bottomline, all the prompt design advice that you can find on the internet is really not great.
- kubelsmieci 1mo agoCan you share some tips what worked for you?
- mojuba 1mo agoGenerally, facts over instructions. This has been Anthropic's recommendation too, in one of their recent blog posts. Also the shorter the better, let the model figure out the rest. Overinstruction degrades intelligence. We tend to underestimate their capabilities, we overinstruct them and then complain about them being dumb.
- TZubiri 1mo ago> LLM's are bad at designing prompts. You are going down a maddening rabbit hole. Prompts are the things humans write, you are building gas town but unironically