Natural conversations

There’s no perfect prompt, no perfect instruction, no perfect project spec. That’s not where the work is done. The prompts are the sentences, the memos, the emails to the team along the way. When we talk to the human, we don’t sit there to craft a perfect sentence before the words come out. We let them come out and we shape it how it comes, together in the conversation.

Real work is messy and undefined and unpredictable. Spending any time to craft a prompt is time wasted. We’ve got it in our heads that they need a good prompt. With enough iterations, a long chain of two-word prompts will outdo an excellent and laborious 2-shot prompt. And you yourself as the operator will gather way more insights along the way than the two responses.

It’s wild how the “prompt engineering” crowd has convinced everyone that the secret is in the prompt. Work never comes pre-packaged in a neat little prompt-shaped box and it needs exploration. The obsession with prompts is actually making people LESS productive because we spend more time thinking about how to ask than just asking. If you approached human conversations the way people approach AI, with this rigid, pre-planned, one-shot mindset, we’d never get anything done.