Prompting is just writing, slowly

Every good prompt I've written started as a bad paragraph. When the output disappoints, the problem is almost never the model — it's that I hadn't decided what I wanted yet.

So now I write the prompt the way I'd write a note to a smart colleague: what I'm trying to do, what I already know, what a good answer looks like.

Half the time I don't even send it. Writing it out was the work.