Prompting Isn't the Skill

Gabriel Azoulay

1d • 💬 General discussion

I went through

@Bas Rosario

prompting course this morning.

Before I'd written a word of today's article, two things about how I work had already changed.

First, the way I laid out the images on today's piece.

A couple of posts in that course make the case that information lands harder broken into small, labeled pieces than as one photo with a caption underneath — a numbered step, a before/after split, the current stage lit up against the rest dimmed. I'd been doing something close to that already, without a name for it.

Today's article uses it deliberately for the first time, because of those two posts specifically.

Second, two habits I've been sloppy about for longer than I'd like to admit.

If a piece of work needs a decision made and a finished result delivered in the same breath, I split it now — decide first, build second — instead of letting the decision get made halfway through and the result inherit whatever got decided in passing, unexamined.

And when something I check comes back wrong, I stopped guessing at why. I check in order: is this the wrong shape entirely, the right shape with the wrong specifics, or something that genuinely couldn't be done the way I asked.

Three different fixes, and guessing at which one wastes whichever fix actually applies.

Neither of those two habits is about today's article.

They're just true, and they were true before this article existed as an idea, because I read seven posts about prompting this morning and two of them weren't really about prompting at all.

What's the last thing you read that changed how you work before you'd even gotten to the task you sat down for?

https://medium.com/@gabeyoga/you-got-good-at-prompting-thats-not-the-skill-anymore-4e4497753ef2?sharedUserId=gabeyoga

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Prompting Isn't the Skill