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. Helped? Keep it. Didn't? Revert and step back. 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.
