My current favorite prompt fragment is the expert lens:
Think like an expert. In this context:
- What patterns would an expert in this field check / recognize that beginners would miss?
- What questions would an expert ask that a beginner would not know to?
- What problems / failures would an expert anticipate that beginners may not be aware of?
- How would an expert analyze this? At each step, explain what they are looking for and why.
When I add this to my questions, if feels a lot smarter.
I have no idea if that’s because it really improves the replies, or because it prefixes them with “What an expert would do is…” which makes it sound smarter, or because it just makes me feel good about adding this prompt.
Irrespective of the reason, the effect is that I pay more attention to it. Increasingly, that’s the bottleneck - the most important part. If I’m attentive, I learn / act. At least for that, this prompt is useful to me.
But I also believe it actually improves the quality of replies.