Caught myself using the same five prompt templates for six months before someone pointed out I was basically copying and pasting my own bad habits.

I realized it when I asked my cousin who works at an AI lab to look at my workflow and she just laughed and said man you are really doing this the hard way, has anyone else had to unlearn a bunch of stuff after thinking they had it figured out?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaron89628d ago

That thing @williamh65 said about wearing your shirt backwards is pretty much how I felt. It's not that templates are bad, taraw16 is right that they save time. The problem is when your templates are secretly terrible and you just never noticed. I had this one prompt I thought was brilliant but it was actually making the AI repeat itself in three different ways every single time. Spent six months wondering why my outputs all sounded the same drone. Someone finally pointed out my template was basically asking for the same info phrased three different ways. Felt real dumb deleting that one.

williamh6528d ago

Oh man, that's like finding out you've been wearing your shirt backwards all day and nobody told you.

taraw1628d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, do you actually think using the same few templates is automatically a bad thing though? I mean, I spent months tweaking my prompts for the stuff I do every day, and now I've got like three firm favorites that save me so much time. If I'm writing product descriptions or blog outlines, why would I reinvent the wheel each time? The real skill is knowing when to bend or break those patterns, not ditching them entirely.