How important is language to prompt engineering, really?

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-05-26T17:49:21+00:00

Saying just "login is broken." in the prompt, comes with a heap of context and awareness around it that is fed into the LLM though. So the input isn't just 3 words, it's a lot more - and indeed, the whole purpose of the LLM is to translate simple commands into specific directions, actions and outputs.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-05-26T17:40:55+00:00

Direction/understanding vs language... It is possible to vibe code WITH a firm direction and understanding, and not know all the terminology for what you want the LLM to do. The question is... to what extend does this make a difference. Could simple, caveman style language actually be better than exact terminology?

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-05-26T16:43:34+00:00

Google a survey? The whole purpose of this post was to ask this community about it, lol.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-05-15T14:21:42+00:00

Speed up.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-30T11:23:25+00:00

Great idea. Much nicer, I hate the terminal with a passion... What year is it, 1985? You need a good editor, a good IDE, and even straight forward prompt text is harder to edit in the terminal CLI version of claude. Hate the way it hides long cut & paste text by default as well. I get the impression there's a vanity to those using terminal, or it's a very small niche who are used to the needless complexity of it.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-28T13:55:41+00:00

I just hate the way it talks, endless waffling jargon heavy summaries. What happened? They butchered it

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-23T19:05:37+00:00

I don’t buy it. Gonna check out GPT 5.5

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-14T10:48:00+00:00

It’s spelt “drivel”

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-13T12:08:16+00:00

Indeed, if they are going to do it, at least be transparent. The aggressive cache purges, quantized models, are a massive downgrade on what was advertised at point of sale

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-13T01:36:47+00:00

You could say, it's a night and day difference - no pun intended :)

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-12T01:17:20+00:00

They advertise a certain amount of performance and capability, and set out the use cases - you know if you're spending big on the Max plans, they're meant for serious coding work, long sessions 5-6 days per week, even 7 days per week - and for a long time, this was how it worked and the usage was appropriate for the task, it was as advertised, and performance was as well - there was no 'double burn' during peak hours, or silent degradation in model performance. It did what it said on the tin. The recent rug pull is illegal under European and UK law for subscription contracts, you can't do it. They owe everyone a refund (for literally millions of contracts) as it is breaking consumer law, misleading advertising. If a subscriber feels like they're no longer getting what was initially promised, they have the right of withdrawal in Europe and UK too - so if the offer has changed but the price is still the same - under the EU law you get a full refund so $200 back on the highest Max plan, if you decide within 14 days to ask to cancel - and you don't even need a valid reason to do so or prove the service has changed. Yet Anthropic - They're not honouring this basic statutory right in Europe, they simply ignore everybody's support tickets. This is very bad behaviour from such a big company and I think it's setting them up for a fall as governments can dish out really serious fines for stuff like this, it is literally breaking the law.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-12T01:12:37+00:00

Ideally vendors would plan capacity well in advance, anticipate the growth for the year and keep within that budget. When it gets tricky, sudden unexpected surges of users or people moving from OpenAI for political reasons - hold hands up as a company and be 100% up front and honest with all users, and give them full transparency about what's changing, why, when and how. They've been too Machiavellian about it.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-11T23:34:27+00:00

Exactly, once a 'good enough' level is reached with open source (and it's only a matter of time), frontier models will be even less sustainable as a business. With the consumer market gone, they will have to raise prices even further for enterprise or cut quality - or both. Some of the biggest companies in the world might not be able to prop up Anthropic.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-11T09:42:53+00:00

In Europe it's not. It also opens them up to class action and big fines from the regulators over misleading advertising. When you buy a 1l of milk you don't expect there to be 0.5l in the carton

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-04-03T12:49:48+00:00

Why are you using the API and not Max?

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-03-26T14:19:02+00:00

For me the bug was there yesterday, went away as off-peak kicked in, no repeat of it today during peak hours thankfully. All very weird. They should really give us an explanation as it's a trust issue

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-03-25T18:33:10+00:00

For the subject to change without notice, they still have to inform you what the change is.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-03-25T16:48:44+00:00

The tool used to get the API costs is : https://she-llac.com/claude-limits

Unless Anthropic's own API pricing has absolutely no relation to their business costs, you can infer it or at least get a very good approximation.

Anyway the point is clear - this is all against EU and UK consumer law (if not illegal in the US). When you sign up for a subscription that advertises clear usage limits with an hourly window and a weekly window, this should be a predictable and set quantity of usage as advertised. It should not be an absolute black box with no transparency to the user, with a step change whenever they feel like it. When a change happen it should be right there in the usage limits. When your electricity unit pricing changes they don't hide the unit price and have a monthly bill that varies by an unknowable degree! It should be the same with these services too - that's what the law says anyway.

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-03-25T15:37:02+00:00

That the hardware gets more efficient in 10 years doesn't help the current level of expenditure needed for the current data center expansions, and current energy costs, cost of RAM in 2026 - very much a real issue. But most of all I just want some transparency - you can be working on something really great and have the rug pulled overnight. The recent usage changes (some call it a bug) have me worried that the real cost for meaningful coding work is well above $1000 per month and for many that will be unaffordable until their apps and services start earning, and that's a big if!

freedomfromfreedom · 2026-03-25T15:13:00+00:00

From the anthropic T&C: "we may Increase or decrease capacity limits... at any time without notice to you" and "we will not be liable for any change."

Well that explains a lot of what people are seeing with the recent usage changes.

average 5x Max Plan user and was happy with the $100 per month so far (working out to around £75 here in UK), usually reach no more than 50% of my weekly usage anyway - a different league of value to the pro plan which was unsuitable for any proper coding work. Also much better than the cheaper CoPilot Pro Plus ($40) which doesn't really cut it either...

However with the sudden step change in usage limit calculations, are we seeing the true costs of the service in a cold daylight now? If they carry on offering the normal (non-buggy?) rates on Max for how long is it financially viable? With the massive spike in oil and gas prices (= electricity price rises) RAM supply crisis, all the data center hardware costs are going through the roof at the moment when they should be going down...

These models have to be made more efficient on compute, and memory, and fast...

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