Prompts Aren't Real

Everyone is driving themselves crazy exchanging text with LLM’s these days.

I would like to propose an alternative. We should all go insane building interlocking evaluation and optimization pipelines, instead. The path to victory in our war with AI is to ignore the prompts, and bring even more AI firepower to bear.

Like my friend Coda says all the time: "the textual nature of prompts leads us to take the intentional stance towards systems which aren’t conscious, and thus miss the essential nature of their non-meaning."

If you like this, check out my website and my other talks .

I’m an engineer living in Los Angeles. I’ve been in engineering for like 25 years and I’ve been lucky.

One way I’ve been lucky lately is that I’ve gotten the chance to flail at making agents run reliably in production.