Lesson 12: Improving a prompt through iteration
A great prompt is almost never born fully formed on the first try — you arrive at it. Last lesson we learned to diagnose what went wrong in an output; here we learn what to do with the diagnosis. The secret is controlled iteration: change one thing at a time, compare the new output to the old, keep
Don't rewrite everything at once — change one thing, run it, and compare to the previous result. If the change helped, keep it; if not, revert and move on. That way you know exactly what helped.
- iteration
- A repeated improvement loop: draft → test → diagnose → change → compare, again and again until the output is good enough.
- one change at a time
- Changing a single element of the prompt each round, so you know for certain which change caused the improvement or the harm.
- comparing versions
- Putting the new version's output next to the previous one's and checking whether the change actually improved things.