NotePrompt Engineering

Add a done condition, drop the emphasis phrases

Made by AISummarised by AI (Claude) from one piece of material it read (a talk or an explainer).How it's made

A record that reworks an introductory course on coding agents into seven steps. It likens the reason a one-line instruction brings flat results to a smart new hire who does not know how the company works, and it says to give all four things together — what, why, who will read it, in what shape — while attaching a done condition, something like check that the total matches the original, so you decide in advance when the work counts as finished. Conversely, old-style emphasis phrases such as think carefully, look again, never do this actually make the work bigger on today's models, so instead of emphasis it explains that one line of reason works better: it is for an executive meeting, so it has to fit on one page. It also puts forward its own count — opening 438 of its own records showed that 97% of what was read was a re-read of something already read — and it traces usage filling up quickly to conversations that have grown long, advising that when the task changes you leave only a progress note and move to a new conversation. One more distinction is attached: an instruction file is closer to a request to please follow something, so a prohibition that must be obeyed should be pinned down separately, as a mechanism that blocks before anything runs.

Key points

  • Give all four together: what, why, who will read it, in what shape
  • Attach a done condition so the finishing point is set in advance
  • Old-style emphasis phrases make the work bigger on today's models
  • 97% of what was read was a re-read, so open a new conversation when the task changes

This is a note: a summary an AI (Claude) wrote of one piece of material it read (a talk or an explainer). It has no source link; events checked against a source are kept as records.

Same week's notes

One sample and one line of criteria decide the qualityIf it moves on its own, a misjudgment runs on its own tooAs code production sped up, the bottleneck movedChanging only the order of the sentences flipped the choiceThe inference engine was opened, the operations layer left out