[john_strinlai]

i read his, too. his replies are indeed more directed, but also quite short, unstructured, and natural sounding. if i recall, maybe 1 or 2 of his prompts exceeded 50(ish) words.

in my head, the comparison is the multi-paragraph prompts (borderline essays) i would read in various communities on reddit and similar forums, that people (often self-proclaimed "prompt engineers") said were "required" to get good output. or some of the prompts ive read in various logs that are like a thousand words of setup.

even looking back at the first prompts i was sending when i started to use chatgpt were (in hindsight) crazy long and full of unnecessary guidance/caveats/"ignore xyz"/etc.

[annzabelle]

I didn't use generative AI much until a couple months ago. My last employer had a copilot license that I dabbled in in 2024, and wasn't impressed with, and then I spent the latter half of 2025 and early 2026 budget traveling/hiking a lot. I started at a new company in May, and I've been astonished at how lazy I can be at prompting and still get impressive results with 2026 Claude Code.

I can paste entire failure logs with the word "why" lowercase, no question mark, and get into a productive chat session where it significantly speeds up the bug trace. I will paste the text from a groomed ticket with no editing or additional instructions into the chat and then give it a bit of feedback on the plan for a couple iterations.

I feel so vindicated in never spending time learning prompting as a specific skill, it really just took a couple more years and the models are really easy to interact with with simple natural language.

[fn-mote]

> were (in hindsight) crazy long and full of unnecessary guidance

Not sure when you started. However: I would never judge the necessity of details provided 2 or 3 years ago based on results that the current models give.