Prompt Craft
Saying what you do not want is the half of the instruction people leave out
Describing the output you want narrows the field far less than it feels like it does, and the difference is…
· 4 min read
Bhavna Deshpande
Editor, Prompt After Prompt
Bhavna covers prompt craft, writing with ai, images & audio and the questions readers actually send in and thinks most subjects are more interesting once you know how they work.
Writing With AI
The blank page and the last paragraph are not equally good places to ask
These tools are most valuable at the two ends of a writing task and least valuable in the middle, and…
· 4 min read
Workflows
One long instruction hides which step failed
A single prompt that extracts, judges and writes gives you no way to tell which of those three went wrong…
· 4 min read
Workflows
Long inputs sag in the middle and the fix is structural
Supplying more material does not straightforwardly mean more of it gets used, and building around that…
· 4 min read
Workflows
A prompt you cannot find again is not part of a workflow
Instructions that live in chat history are irrecoverable in practice, and treating them as artefacts with a…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
A tool that agrees with you has not confirmed anything
Agreement is close to free, which makes it worthless as evidence and dangerous as a habit, particularly…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The skill you stop practising is the one you needed to check the output
Reviewing generated work well depends on the same competence that producing it would have built, which…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
Two requirements that conflict get reconciled without telling you
Most prompts contain a quiet contradiction, the resolution is never announced, and the difference between a…
· 3 min read
Writing With AI
Publishing in a language you cannot read is a bet you cannot check
The usual safeguards all depend on being able to evaluate the output, so working into an unfamiliar…
· 3 min read
Images & Audio
Fixing part of a picture is a different job from asking for another one
Once a generated image is nearly right, regenerating throws away everything that worked, and the skills…
· 4 min read
Workflows
A process that runs unattended decays without announcing it
Automated steps keep producing output after the conditions they were built for have changed, and the…
· 3 min read
Writing With AI
Routine messages go wrong by being longer and warmer than the situation
Everyday correspondence is the highest-volume writing most people do, and the default output misjudges it…
· 3 min read
Images & Audio
Colour is requested as a mood and delivered as an approximation
Naming a specific colour in an image prompt gets you the neighbourhood rather than the shade, and the…
· 4 min read
Images & Audio
Enlarging a picture invents the detail it appears to recover
Upscaling produces plausible texture where there was none, which is useful for presentation and dangerous…
· 3 min read
Workflows
Reviewing two hundred outputs is a different skill from reviewing one
Checking at volume fails through attention rather than through ignorance, so the review has to be designed…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
The output that is nearly right is the one that gets through
Obvious errors are caught by anybody; the damage is done by results that are correct in every visible…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
A number acquires authority the moment it is written down
Quantitative output is checked less carefully than prose because it looks like a result, and figures that…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
A form you have never written before needs its conventions requested first
When the document type is unfamiliar the difficulty is not the sentences but the expectations attached to…
· 4 min read
Prompt Craft
A correction that names the span it applies to is the one that lands
Revision requests usually describe a dissatisfaction rather than a location, and the fix is to say which…
· 3 min read
Workflows
Work out the manual route before the deadline, not during it
A process that depends on a service you do not control needs a plan for the day it is slow, unavailable or…
· 3 min read
Workflows
Changing the method halfway leaves you with two batches rather than one
The realisation that a better approach exists arrives most often in the middle of a run, and the cost of…
· 3 min read