How to Write Good Prompts

To internalize a concept, you need to understand its components and relationships.

A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In some sense, procedures are lists. So we can start by using the cloze-deletion method we used for the ingredient list:

Q:

1. ???


2. Bring to a simmer on low heat (this will take about an hour). We use low heat to produce a bright, clean flavor: at higher temperatures, the stock will both taste and look duller.


3. Lower heat to maintain a bare simmer for an h

... See more

It’s helpful to add similar caveats to your prompts whenever you’re working with subjective, provisional, or incomplete information. In some sense, most of the prompts we’ve been writing are provisional: other recipes will probably do things somewhat differently. So we could phrase everything more tentatively, but in practice that’s more distractin... See more

Explanation-type prompts are especially valuable when studying procedures: they can help you avoid rote learning and build a deeper understanding. Note that in this particular case, we were only able to traverse one level of “why.” Why low heat? A cleaner flavor, says the recipe. Why does low heat produce a cleaner flavor? It doesn’t say. You might... See more

Q. How long should it take to heat a batch of chicken stock (with 2lbs of bones)?

A. About an hour

This knowledge isn’t essential, but “heads-up!”-type information can be quite useful when learning procedures. If you know this detail, you’ll leave yourself enough time when making stock, you won’t be confused when your pot takes forever to heat up, an... See more

The recipe is quite linear, but more complex procedures may branch, including conditions or special cases which could trigger some alternate path in the flowchart. Such predicate structures are usually worth capturing. If the branching is sufficiently complex, you might consider drawing a flowchart and using that in your prompt.

In our stock recipe, the verbs aren’t very important: “bring,” “lower,” “strain.” You’re cooking ingredients in water at various temperatures, so those actions are obvious. But conditions or heuristics describing when to move between verbs are important: first when the water reaches a simmer, then after ninety minutes passes. And while it’s not wor... See more

As you build fluency in increasingly complex concepts, you can write increasingly complex prompts while keeping each focused on what feels like a single detail. In fact, the ability to think in terms of increasingly complex “chunks” appears to be a significant part of what expertise actually is.

For a compelling demonstration, see Chase and Simon, P... See more