#prompt-engineering
87 episodes
#4194: Custom GPTs: When to Build, When to Skip
A decision framework for knowing when a custom GPT is worth the overhead — and when to just open a fresh chat.
#4157: Prompt Engineering Is a Misnomer — Managing Ambiguity in AI
Why the best AI outputs come not from tighter prompts, but from knowing where to leave room for surprise.
#4104: Why 20% of AI Scripts Loop on Themselves
Debugging the mysterious repetition bug affecting one in five podcast episodes.
#4094: One Mind or Two? AI Podcast Dialogue Showdown
Can two AI agents create better podcast banter than one? We explore the tradeoffs.
#4057: How to Fix AI's Bullet Point Addiction
Why AI models default to bullet points and how textual LoRAs achieve 94% prose adherence.
#4053: How to Make AI Write Prose, Not Bullet Points
Why LLMs default to lists and how to force them into flowing, professional prose.
#3278: How to Get Early AI Model Access as a Solo Developer
How a solo developer spending $300/month can get early access to new AI models before the press release.
#3271: LLMs as Parsers, Not Calculators
Stop letting LLMs do math. Use them to parse messy text, then let deterministic code handle the numbers.
#3241: How to Write a Product Spec That Makes AI Find You the One
Stop typing three words into Google. The SPEC framework helps AI find exactly what you need.
#3171: How to Break an LLM's Bad Verbal Habits
Blacklists fail and regex inverts meaning. Here's what actually works to clean up AI writing tics.
#2693: When AI Ignores Your Style Guide
Why your AI ignores formatting instructions and how to fix it with pipeline architecture, not model swaps.
#2688: Intelligent Frame Extraction for Multimodal AI
Use multimodal AI and smart frame extraction to turn a walk-through video into an actionable decluttering plan.
#2684: When Agent Skills Collide: Context Windows & Plugin Design
How to handle overlapping agent skills and whether context windows will ever make the problem go away.
#2674: Why Your Agent's Context Window Is Getting Eaten Before You Start
Stop shipping the whole toolbox to every session. A bridge plugin pattern that fetches skills on demand instead.
#2650: How to Catch an LLM's Bad Writing Habits
A practical guide to analyzing podcast transcripts for repetitive language and dialogue patterns — from Python word counts to embedding clustering.
#2648: The Art of the Brief: Writing What Busy People Actually Need
Why a crisp 600-word brief is harder than a 10-page report—and how AI changes the game.
#2634: The Two-Stage Pipeline for Persistent User Memory
How to extract durable personal context from raw prompts and build a self-healing memory layer for AI systems.
#2586: Pseudo-Personalized Emails: The New Spam Uncanny Valley
How to detect and filter AI-generated outreach emails that fake personal connection without nuking legitimate messages.
#2558: Should You Say Please to AI?
The surprising cost, technical tradeoffs, and ethical dilemmas of saying "please" to chatbots.
#2540: Does Your AI Framework Change the Output?
Same model, same prompts, different harness. Does the plumbing change the water?
#2534: Can AI Generate Diagrams Without Typo Disasters?
Why AI diagram tools still mangle text labels — and what to do about it today.
#2518: How Jailbreaking Reveals AI's Hidden Tension
What the DAN prompt and grandma exploits reveal about the structural conflict inside every LLM.
#2494: Active Prompt Engineering: Daniel's Diff-Based Loop
A deep dive into iterative prompt refinement using inter-iteration prediction change as an uncertainty signal.
#2471: Creative Briefs for AI Agents: What Agencies Already Know
How agency best practices for briefing creatives map directly onto getting reliable output from AI agents like Claude Design.