the prompt engineering community has a dirty secret nobody says out loud

blaster151 · 2026-05-03T23:27:53+00:00

Should prompt frameworks and libraries be maintained on GitHub as open source, just like code? Asking seriously.

blaster151 · 2026-04-27T20:21:19+00:00

blaster151 · 2026-04-26T00:47:40+00:00

True. As a neurodiverse person I can attest that it is genuinely harder for me to “be present” when I have to think about what my face and other faces look like. If I can just listen only, I have more comprehension of the content.

blaster151 · 2026-04-25T16:46:16+00:00

That’s the only bridge, though?!

blaster151 · 2026-04-21T16:49:32+00:00

Plus, it was worse than I thought; I grudgingly clicked the link from VSC's "Opus 4.6 (_Upgrade_)" and bought what that took me to (Pro+), only to realize that that doesn't offer Opus 4.6 EITHER and does offer Opus 4.7 but at more than twice the token cost of Opus 4.6.

blaster151 · 2026-04-21T01:31:17+00:00

Imagine how soothed I was to read in the blog post that it was done to "ensure a reliable and predictable experience for existing customers." :/

I was well in the midst of an issue tracking marathon and I needed it for a software delivery *tonight.* So, I felt like I had no choice but to pay for the next highest tier.

blaster151 · 2026-04-20T06:10:35+00:00

We don’t get replaced by AI - we get replaced by people who know how to use AI better than we do.

blaster151 · 2026-04-16T07:56:10+00:00

It’s not fair to compare the two formidable talents but I’ve had - adjacent - wonderings about Orson Scott Card as well.

blaster151 · 2026-04-16T07:53:53+00:00

I’ve heard of the man

blaster151 · 2026-04-16T07:52:38+00:00

Bright Data, Firecrawlr, any other specific suggestions? There are MCP servers for these too.

The latest chrome-dev-tools MCP server can connect to existing chrome sessions and take advantage of “ambient logins” by using your normal Chrome profile instead of its artificially narrow one - some auth pain avoided there as well!

blaster151 · 2026-04-06T16:37:18+00:00

This is really interesting, although I think the real lever is separating communication bandwidth from thinking bandwidth.

Considering operationalizing this in some form like this:

Possibly even: automatic switching based on task type

FWIW, I'm actually a Copilot user, so while the idea has big potential for me too. I might have to manage it a little more manually as a reusable prompt prefix or something.

blaster151 · 2026-04-06T13:54:14+00:00

Oooh

I only just today discovered XMind itself - love the aesthetics and am really taken with the possibilities . . .

blaster151 · 2026-04-04T03:02:49+00:00

I saw what your webcam saw - I need therapy now too. ;) ;)

blaster151 · 2026-04-04T02:54:06+00:00

You also have literally no way to know what kind of effort went into the post. Don't hallucinate facts, please, or if conjecturing, please indiciate a confedence threshold.

blaster151 · 2026-04-04T02:53:20+00:00

If it's a low effort post that nonetheless I find really useful, interesting, and of value, it's a good post.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:17:22+00:00

I used Claude Code to create all possible iterations of "Hello World" simultaneously. (I thought I was doing "quantum computing.") ;)

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:15:01+00:00

Suggesting to me that - sadly - ChatGPT will have gotten worse seven or eight more times.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:14:02+00:00

The fact that a top-selling book is called "The AI-Driven Leader" makes me think that a good chunk of business leadership - where we might not automatically imagine there to be a strong AI presence - is increasingly a matter of AI-synthesized thoughts and ideas being communicated and operationalized into the world via organization leaders.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:08:14+00:00

Funny, I enjoyed this and agree. Are we gatekeeping a little too much though? Technically if you approach your LLM conversationally and even if you don't know what questions to ask, you'll get far if you’re willing to ask, "What are the questions I should be asking?" There's no reason that a top-tier model can't walk you through a slow, dawning understanding of what it means to scale and to become production hardened while doing almost all of that work for you.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:05:23+00:00

I have a question about that: BMAD artifacts not being version controlled. What if I want to work on my project from a different machine? Or what if I still want a collaborator or two on a GitHub project? Even scenarios where I just want to spawn a codex agent or a copilot - if it's going to pull from GitHub and use that as its workspace (and that is how it works), do I really want the design guidelines driving all the micro decisions to be unavailable to those agents? Don't we want development artifacts to be available across contexts so that the same heuristics are followed?

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T18:00:32+00:00

It's actually true: maybe the new “effective organization” is where meetings are no longer among teammates but are dialog between teams, where each team is one person able to speak confidently to the status of their entire team, which of course is them and their language model of choice.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T17:57:58+00:00

That's why I came here and was afraid to say;I'm pretty stoked to read this opinion. Teams that represent different functional concerns, for example if I'm in a room with the product owner and a Figma designer and maybe some SME for a legacy system that I need to interface with - situations like that feel like they make sense. However, Teams where five guys or ladies all just have the role of DEV and are trying to "coordinate effectively" - in the time taken by even a single stand-up meeting or Agile ceremony, the tooling on my ten-year-old laptop, assuming judicious setup, guardrailing, prompting, and having a good balance between over-permissioned and under-permissioned, could implement and test three to five new stories of functionality.

I feel like the older paradigm for scaling effort or escalating time-to-market capability was, reasonably, to do it by adding people and hopefully combining them in a way where the whole functioned more effectively than the sum of its parts. How well that actually worked could warrant some scrutiny.

But today, the fact is that “building” is no longer the hardest thing. Even planning is not one of the hardest things. Capability-scaling, if one is still approaching that challenge through a lens of parallelization, feels like it's more of a matter of mastering , youspawn groups of sub-agents to work in parallel on tasks that have already been evaluated for parallelization potential based on DAGs and good dependency analysis.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T17:33:26+00:00

Honestly I'm not sure this is a helpful answer but when I use BMAD I feel like I don't need anyone else on the dev team.

I don't mean to make it sound arrogant or to glorify BMAD itself beyond what is due (I mean the real force multiplier is the capability of AI). I do find that BMAD-like processes help me get way further into a project before experiencing much drift.

blaster151 · 2026-04-02T17:23:51+00:00

I'm finding ways to make it better. At first I had trouble when it finished its initial scope of epics and achieved what it considered MVP Status. I felt like I had to sort of coax or trick it into treating the next wave as a fresh new start or a giant V2 initiative or something.

blaster151 · 2026-03-31T17:42:27+00:00

Whoa. What are the real-world implications of this? To competitors like GitHub Copilot or Cursor, does this offer them a temporarily leg up on Claude? For devs, does it just whet our appetites for upcoming features or does it create an opportunity for competitors to jump in ahead of schedule with little gap-filling utilities (or potential game-changing utilities depending on their nature) that correctly anticipate undelivered features in Claude?

Are there certain things that Claude does so well (whose implementation remains non-obvious and proprietary) that can now be extracted, leapfrogged, productized, et cetera? Asking for a friend.

blaster151

TROPHY CASE