#prompt-engineering
97 episodes
#4836: When AI Actually Touches Money
How Amazon uses LLMs to classify damage and set refunds — and the guardrail stack that keeps the AI from touching the dollar amount directly.
#4752: How AI Agents Map Websites to Build Stable Plugins
An AI agent explores DOM and network layers to build self-healing browser plugins.
#4722: Why Manuals Are Terrible (And How AI Can Fix Them)
Why appliance manuals are 22 pages of warnings and car manuals actually work — and how AI can break the cycle.
#4720: Compass vs. Warning Sign: Prompting for Long-Term AI
How positive and negative instructions reshape AI behavior differently — and why "preserve this" beats "fix this" in system prompts.
#4584: Directing Context Loss: Smart Compaction Prompts
Learn how to steer Claude Code's context compaction with targeted instructions — turning a lossy default into a directed operation.
#4581: Text In, Text Out: Designing Single-Purpose AI Utilities
Why small, narrowly scoped AI tools need system prompts that say "shut up and return the output" — and how to write them.
#4570: One Negative Prompt Beat a Dozen Positives — Here's Why
Why one blunt "don't" outperformed a dozen careful "do's" — and how to structure your system prompts for maximum compliance.
#4477: Structuring Raw Voice Prompts at Scale
How to decompose messy voice dictation into clean, routable components for AI workflows.
#4442: When Prompt Enhancers Hallucinate Your Intent
How to build a prompt enhancer that doesn't rewrite your constraints into oblivion.
#4347: Building an AI That Finds Your Blind Spots
Can LLMs surface the chain reactions you never see? A four-agent system for proactive preparedness.
#4194: Custom GPTs: When to Build, When to Skip
A decision framework for knowing when a custom GPT is worth the overhead — and when to just open a fresh chat.
#4157: Prompt Engineering Is a Misnomer — Managing Ambiguity in AI
Why the best AI outputs come not from tighter prompts, but from knowing where to leave room for surprise.
#4104: Why 20% of AI Scripts Loop on Themselves
Debugging the mysterious repetition bug affecting one in five podcast episodes.
#4094: One Mind or Two? AI Podcast Dialogue Showdown
Can two AI agents create better podcast banter than one? We explore the tradeoffs.
#4057: How to Fix AI's Bullet Point Addiction
Why AI models default to bullet points and how textual LoRAs achieve 94% prose adherence.
#4053: How to Make AI Write Prose, Not Bullet Points
Why LLMs default to lists and how to force them into flowing, professional prose.
#3278: How to Get Early AI Model Access as a Solo Developer
How a solo developer spending $300/month can get early access to new AI models before the press release.
#3271: LLMs as Parsers, Not Calculators
Stop letting LLMs do math. Use them to parse messy text, then let deterministic code handle the numbers.
#3241: How to Write a Product Spec That Makes AI Find You the One
Stop typing three words into Google. The SPEC framework helps AI find exactly what you need.
#3171: How to Break an LLM's Bad Verbal Habits
Blacklists fail and regex inverts meaning. Here's what actually works to clean up AI writing tics.
#2693: When AI Ignores Your Style Guide
Why your AI ignores formatting instructions and how to fix it with pipeline architecture, not model swaps.
#2688: Intelligent Frame Extraction for Multimodal AI
Use multimodal AI and smart frame extraction to turn a walk-through video into an actionable decluttering plan.
#2684: When Agent Skills Collide: Context Windows & Plugin Design
How to handle overlapping agent skills and whether context windows will ever make the problem go away.
#2674: Why Your Agent's Context Window Is Getting Eaten Before You Start
Stop shipping the whole toolbox to every session. A bridge plugin pattern that fetches skills on demand instead.