Not sure where to start with an AI prompt, or want to make your prompts better? Metaprompting can help!
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Metaprompting My AI, Because Who Knows Better?
Occasionally, I want AI to help me accomplish a task, but I’m not sure the best way to ask it to do that. Whenever I’m stumped for a prompt, I turn to the best expert I know on AI … my AI.
Metaprompting is the art of having the AI help you craft the prompt you’re going to use with the AI — and improve its own instructions.
Starting a Prompt from Scratch and Steadily Improving
When I’m starting from scratch, I can ask the AI to be my prompt engineer and walk me through the process of crafting the prompt. Here’s an example of a prompt I use to start the process:
Act as my prompt engineer. We’re going to work together to create a prompt I can use to have you help me accomplish a task. You need to follow exactly this process.
First, you’re going to ask me what task I want to accomplish – what’s the goal of the prompt.
Second, you’re going to give me a draft of the prompt based on what I’ve told you, then ask any follow-up questions that will help you further refine the prompt to make it better.
Repeat this second step as many times as you need to until you’re confident that we’ve got the best possible prompt.
Running this prompt will trigger the AI to have a conversation with me that leads to a series of steadily improving prompts. Once the AI gets to the final prompt (which usually takes 3-5 iterations, in my experience), I can copy that prompt, start a new conversation and paste in the prompt.
Within just a minute or two, I generally have a well-designed and effective prompt to accomplish my task.
Bonus: I find that the process of having this conversation with the AI causes me to think more deeply about what I’m trying to do, which can lead me to an even better outcome.
Improving An Existing Prompt
Sometimes I’m not starting from scratch but have an existing prompt that I’d like to make better. I can usually get some good ideas just by asking the AI to help critique my prompt.
What I’ll do is, after I’ve finished my conversation with the AI about whatever the task was, I’ll add one more prompt at the end:
Suggest ways I could have made my original prompt in this conversation more effective.
The AI will take a look at the conversation we just had and suggest things I could do next time to get to a better outcome more quickly or efficiently.
Sound Like Me … But What Do I Sound Like?
Another use for metaprompting comes when you’re trying to describe something to the AI but struggling to find the right words.
For example, you want the AI to draft a blog post or a letter, and you want it to sound like you do. But … how do you describe your own writing style? Simple: Ask the AI.
What I’ll do is find a couple of examples of my own writing that I think best exemplify the style I want, and ask the AI to describe the writing style for me:
How would you describe the voice, tone, and writing style of these articles? <article1>, <article2>, <article3>
The AI will look at the articles and give me a description of what it thinks that style is. Now I can collect those adjectives and use them the next time I want to have the AI draft something that sounds more like me.
This Works for Pictures Too
I use a similar technique when I want AI to create an image. I usually have an idea of what I want the image to look like, but I may not know how to describe that style. If I find an image that has a similar look and feel, I can show the AI that image and ask it to describe its style.
Then I know that what I envisioned is “post-modern, neo-classical, pseudo-realism in earth tones.”
Metaprompting as Your Co-Pilot
You’ve already got a pretty good expert on how to work with AI at your fingertips. Don’t be shy about asking the AI to guide you on how to be more effective with the AI.
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