I don’t want to do the high effort post but the two things that I do that might be obvious or not obvious are
In high level debate, you do a lot of pre-empting about what you mean because the other team is adversarial, and exploit ambiguities in your language to their benefit in front of the judge. Similarly, I have this sense that language models will take the “easy” definition or version of what you are saying, or tend towards defaults. So, I tend to accompany a request with something like: “I’d rather the design not look too Claude-y. I don’t want the text to overlap. I don’t want you to make up your own jailbreak prompts, use a preexisting dataset.” etc and this is also a good forcing function to make you visualize what you want.
High level organisation of points is important. It’s easy to feel like your organisation is great when you make the argument so the ideas are well organised in your head. But even the best judges get lost in the sauce because language is very lossy, so I’ve found that a little bit of organisation can help the agent determine when to spin off subagents, how to divvy up tasks, and what stuff is most load-bearing. So this looks like listing the order in which things should happen, which things are subtasks of other things, etc.
I don’t have debate experience, but I do notice somewhat similar patterns occuring in my prompting too. Although for AI you can be way more rambly and explain things out of order, and trust that their attention will focus onto the proper parts.
I don’t want to do the high effort post but the two things that I do that might be obvious or not obvious are
In high level debate, you do a lot of pre-empting about what you mean because the other team is adversarial, and exploit ambiguities in your language to their benefit in front of the judge. Similarly, I have this sense that language models will take the “easy” definition or version of what you are saying, or tend towards defaults. So, I tend to accompany a request with something like: “I’d rather the design not look too Claude-y. I don’t want the text to overlap. I don’t want you to make up your own jailbreak prompts, use a preexisting dataset.” etc and this is also a good forcing function to make you visualize what you want.
High level organisation of points is important. It’s easy to feel like your organisation is great when you make the argument so the ideas are well organised in your head. But even the best judges get lost in the sauce because language is very lossy, so I’ve found that a little bit of organisation can help the agent determine when to spin off subagents, how to divvy up tasks, and what stuff is most load-bearing. So this looks like listing the order in which things should happen, which things are subtasks of other things, etc.
I don’t have debate experience, but I do notice somewhat similar patterns occuring in my prompting too. Although for AI you can be way more rambly and explain things out of order, and trust that their attention will focus onto the proper parts.