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- Some thoughts on prompt writing...
It’s been a whirlwind of a month and a half since the Prompt Perfect plugin was added to ChatGPT.
And an even wilder seven months spent writing prompts every single day.
We’ve been working relentlessly to build the foundation of this little plugin / prompt design studio into something that will last for decades.
So as a thank you for subscribing, I wanted to personally share a few of my thoughts that might be counter to what you see from the 24/7 hype-and-attention-cycle on social platforms.
Thought 1: People aren’t thinking big enough
Spending everyday learning how to best speak to an AI sounds silly to most people. Some think the mere act of writing a great prompt will be abstracted away by tools like the Prompt Perfect plugin.
Those are all speculative assumptions, as well as what I’m about to say.
Writing great prompts is an extremely underrated skill that has little-to-no widely accepted experts and it will be extremely sought after for decades to come.
One day there will be headlines about somebody being “A Prompt Billionaire,” and people will be quick to make jokes.
That will be due to a lack of understanding, not a lack of value in what good prompts can accomplish.
Thought 2: Tools can enhance, not replace great prompt writers
The Prompt Perfect plugin is a tool I built as a solution to an issue I had. I didn’t know how to write great prompts. I built the codebase in tandem with ChatGPT by writing a lot of prompts.
I wanted it to be a first step for new users to learn about how to speak to ChatGPT, and I feel pretty good about that.
It is by no means a magic pill for automating your life and completing 100% of your tasks in 10% of the time. And I don’t think anyone is even close to the realm of building a widely usable tool that does your prompting for you.
Context is important, and you can’t fake it.
Thought 3: Creativity and Context as King
Even with tools like Prompt Perfect and Perfect Chirp, people default to giving ChatGPT little-to-no context. It feels as though we have a trained muscle from Google search that we only need to offer a few words to get what we’re looking for.
I’ve personally seen ChatGPT output amazing things. That said, I’ve also spent 45 minutes crafting a prompt to get exactly what I’m looking for.
The more people explore creative prompts that offer the correct amount of detail, context, and instructions the more we’ll see new use cases for AI.
Writing prompts is uncharted waters. Everyone has access to a ship and there are many regions to explore.
Bonus Thought 4: Rethink your idea of "prompts”
When I say or type the word “prompt” I’m mostly thinking about apps that abstract a prompt behind a UI. Not a library of prompts in a file.
The tools at Prompt Perfect are some variation of prompts abstracted behind a technology stack.
And since you’ve read this far, we just had our 3rd plugin verified in the ChatGPT plugin store. We’ll release more info on it soon, but if you’d like to play around with it, search for “Promptest”.
Thanks.
I really appreciate everyone who has used Prompt Perfect and/or Perfect Chirp.
When speaking to people not fully investing their time in AI, there is an utter lack of excitement about what’s happening in front of our eyes. It’s nice to find a community of people who get it.
To the future,
Erich
p.s. this was not written in any way by AI. I decided to take a 45 min break from ChatGPT to go old school.