#prompt-engineering
81 episodes
#3278: How to Get Early AI Model Access as a Solo Developer
How a solo developer spending $300/month can get early access to new AI models before the press release.
#3271: LLMs as Parsers, Not Calculators
Stop letting LLMs do math. Use them to parse messy text, then let deterministic code handle the numbers.
#3241: How to Write a Product Spec That Makes AI Find You the One
Stop typing three words into Google. The SPEC framework helps AI find exactly what you need.
#3171: How to Break an LLM's Bad Verbal Habits
Blacklists fail and regex inverts meaning. Here's what actually works to clean up AI writing tics.
#2693: When AI Ignores Your Style Guide
Why your AI ignores formatting instructions and how to fix it with pipeline architecture, not model swaps.
#2688: Intelligent Frame Extraction for Multimodal AI
Use multimodal AI and smart frame extraction to turn a walk-through video into an actionable decluttering plan.
#2684: When Agent Skills Collide: Context Windows & Plugin Design
How to handle overlapping agent skills and whether context windows will ever make the problem go away.
#2674: Why Your Agent's Context Window Is Getting Eaten Before You Start
Stop shipping the whole toolbox to every session. A bridge plugin pattern that fetches skills on demand instead.
#2650: How to Catch an LLM's Bad Writing Habits
A practical guide to analyzing podcast transcripts for repetitive language and dialogue patterns — from Python word counts to embedding clustering.
#2648: The Art of the Brief: Writing What Busy People Actually Need
Why a crisp 600-word brief is harder than a 10-page report—and how AI changes the game.
#2634: The Two-Stage Pipeline for Persistent User Memory
How to extract durable personal context from raw prompts and build a self-healing memory layer for AI systems.
#2586: Pseudo-Personalized Emails: The New Spam Uncanny Valley
How to detect and filter AI-generated outreach emails that fake personal connection without nuking legitimate messages.
#2558: Should You Say Please to AI?
The surprising cost, technical tradeoffs, and ethical dilemmas of saying "please" to chatbots.
#2540: Does Your AI Framework Change the Output?
Same model, same prompts, different harness. Does the plumbing change the water?
#2534: Can AI Generate Diagrams Without Typo Disasters?
Why AI diagram tools still mangle text labels — and what to do about it today.
#2518: How Jailbreaking Reveals AI's Hidden Tension
What the DAN prompt and grandma exploits reveal about the structural conflict inside every LLM.
#2494: Active Prompt Engineering: Daniel's Diff-Based Loop
A deep dive into iterative prompt refinement using inter-iteration prediction change as an uncertainty signal.
#2471: Creative Briefs for AI Agents: What Agencies Already Know
How agency best practices for briefing creatives map directly onto getting reliable output from AI agents like Claude Design.
#2470: Where Intelligence Should Live in Your Pipeline
When should you fine-tune a tiny model for prompt enhancement instead of prompting a large one? The answer depends on latency, precision, and domain.
#2461: How Claude Code's Conversation Compaction Actually Works
The three-tier system, what survives, what dies, and why you shouldn't rely on auto-compact.
#2413: When Your AI Says No to Everything
Why LLMs refuse 73% of harmless prompts — and the trade-off between safety and usefulness.
#2334: How AI Flattens Your Voice in Emails
Why AI-generated emails feel impersonal and how to reclaim your authentic voice in professional communication.
#2309: Blind Ranking AI's Best Podcast Scripts
How do 15 AI models handle controversial podcast prompts? We rank their scripts blind and reveal the surprising winners.
#2242: AI as Your Ideation Blind Spot Spotter
How to use AI not to answer questions you already know to ask, but to surface possibilities your expertise has made invisible to you.