Post #4178478

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange Well yes they do think about the input. There's a species of idiot who writes Prompt Books. Opus and I put this together: Prompt Books "Magic tries to control the world. Science tries to understand it. And that's why science will always win." : my son, age unknown to the astrology-and-crystals guest he said it to He wasn't talking about AI. He was talking to a woman who'd rather burn a candle over a problem than look at it. But he'd already found the line that matters here, years before I needed it: control versus understanding. Two different relationships to a thing you don't yet grasp. Prompt Books are magic dressed as science. They come sold as expertise : two hundred "proven prompts," battle-tested, copy-paste-ready. What they're actually selling is control without understanding. Paste the incantation, get the result, never once ask what the result depends on or why it worked. That's not knowledge. That's a candle. A prompt is a spec, already written, by someone else, for their problem. Copy it and you inherit their answer. You never build the muscle that would let you ask your own question well : and that muscle, not the prompt, is the actual skill. The Sketch methodology in this book bets the opposite way: you can't shortcut the spec-writing, because the spec-writing is the work. Prompt Books sell you the appearance of the work, pre-packaged, so you skip the part where you'd have actually learned something. Worse, they teach a habit of mind. Trust output you can't evaluate, from a process you don't understand, because it worked once for somebody else's use case. That's not a shortcut. That's magical thinking, and magical thinking about a tool this powerful isn't just lazy : it's dangerous, in the same small, ordinary way that skipping the spec is always dangerous. You get code you can't defend when it breaks. Ask for the spec. Ask what the function needs to guarantee. Understand the thing well enough that control becomes almost incidental. My son had that at an age when he should've been thinking about something else entirely. There's no excuse for the rest of us. #ai