Co-worker told me my prompts were too long and it actually worked

Been using AI for code help for about a year now. My coworker Dave saw a prompt I was writing last Tuesday and said 'dude just tell it what you want in 2 sentences.' I was writing full paragraphs with examples and background. He showed me his prompt for the same task and it was like 15 words. Tried it his way and got a better answer in half the time. Anyone else find that shorter prompts actually get better results or am I just lucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

nathan1931d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah shorter prompts force you to actually know what you want before you type, which makes the AI focus on the real problem instead of getting lost in your extra details. It's like the AI reads too much and starts weighting random stuff from your long explanation over what you actually needed solved.

abbychen1d ago

Nathan's got it right about the AI getting lost in extra details. I started trimming my prompts to just the key facts and what I want the output to look like, and the answers got way more consistent.

gonzalez.vera1d ago

so i spent like 30 minutes writing out this huge prompt with backstory and examples last week, and the ai gave me a recipe for banana bread instead of the code fix i needed. trimmed it down to three lines and it worked perfectly first try. guess i just like hearing myself type lmao.