Employees do better when they have more business context. The same is true of LLMs! To do its best work, the LLM needs to know why it’s being prompt

Tell the LLM the business context

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2024-03-30 22:30:04

Employees do better when they have more business context. The same is true of LLMs! To do its best work, the LLM needs to know why it’s being prompted, where its input came from, how its output will be used, and how its output will be judged. Many prompters try to tell the LLM how to achieve some task, but it’s often better to just give it the business context.

An example. Your cooking blog has a very plain homepage. Wouldn’t it be nicer, you think, if each link to a blog post included an intro paragraph to draw readers in? And isn’t this the kind of thing an LLM should be great at writing? So you write your first prompt:

You run it on your blog posts, but the responses you get are inconsistent and mediocre. You pile more instructions into the prompt, until you end up with:

Imagine you’re describing this task to a contractor. You wouldn’t tell them how many sentences to use; you’d just tell them the business context. They’ll figure out what’s appropriate.