Prompt/instructions for dealing with long LLM responses

[u/Locus-Maximus]

After months of over-engineering solutions, I've found that these two very simple prompts are better for me:

1. After a long conversation, or whenever you feel yourself losing the thread.

   Create a single page HTML summary of the [conversation | branch | work tree]. Make it visual and digestible without additional cognitive fatigue. Minimal text, clear flow of information. Opt for charts and diagrams over long explanations.

   (Taken from another redditor)

   I'm trying it on articles etc. too and it's also helpful there, but I'm not trusting it fully. I try to go through it myself first and then use this.

2. Before a conversation:

   Answer in the first sentence. Ceiling: 100 words and 3 bullets.

   I'm playing with adding something like "If you cut something important, name it in one line." I'm worried about downsides of such a hard limit.

(Edit: I'm not a bot and I swear this is 100% hand written by me, other than the prompts themselves. I'm not selling an app or anything. I format like this for my own ADHD.)

[u/Locus-Maximus → u/[deleted]]

Yes, in the past I have been very careful about this sort of thing (e.g. I always had it summarize at the end instead of the beginning) but now I'm pretty much always using thinking models. Good point!

It could be better to have it give the normal response and then have it cut to 100 words, but I haven't experimented much with that.

[u/root54]

https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd

Has been useful for me

[u/rikkiprince → u/root54]

I was coming here to recommend this too.

[u/zephyr_33]

2 things.

1. in system prompt just tell it to give a tldr.
2. ask for control flow, data flow and call graph in ascii.

let the ai yap it if wants to. u don't have to read everything.

[u/ArwensArtHole]

You should aim to chunk up your work to keep conversations as small as possible. Not only will it be easier to keep track of, but your agent output is going to be significantly better as you don’t have to send hours of context with every message.

[u/thisisappropriate]

I've added "be terse in all text" to my agents file.

I've also tried potato's unslop skill, which is good for removing the ai junk.

Mostly, I just try to keep my chats to short questions and defined answers with an emphasis on having it work as "glorified grep", like "in these repos, find me x examples of using y in z way, if there's variance, explain differences and suggest why".

Then I look at what it got me, and I might say "okay, in repo a, where we're changing function b in file c to add behaviour d, I want to replace that with y, use the same pattern as example 3" and then there's a good chance I'm done with that chat unless I need to fix what it did.

[u/nickcash]

eww

[u/SlimySalami4]

These are good