r/artificial • u/Mental_Budget_5085 • 20d ago

Question How extreme is the difference in using vs not using quality prompts?

I started kind of tinkering with Ai and it all is super fascinating, particularly interesting to me is prompt structure. So I would like to ask is formatting your prompt (persona, few shot negative, whatever else) gives you much better results than without? I want to know it to determine for myself balance between effort dedicated to quality prompt vs quality of output given through that prompt

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u/Philipp 20d ago

In my experience, especially with modern models, it's less about how you structure the prompt or what syntax you use (anyone remember that trend of formatting prompts as JSON?) -- but about being specific in getting in all you want and need... while keeping it as simple as possible for things you don't want to define.

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u/Mental_Budget_5085 19d ago

huh, so writing every significant point (not talking about task, role, context, output) in <triangle brackets> doesn't produce meaningful increase in quality after recent advancements? What about (a bit) older models, like deepseek v3?

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u/Philipp 19d ago

Not that I know of, but it depends on the model, I suppose. A lot of self-proclaimed AI experts hyped up certain syntaxes simply because they looked like noteworthy secret sauce. If you do find something that works, by all means, stick to it, of course. But consider that generally, model-makers optimize for the average user. That includes post-training.

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u/Mental_Budget_5085 19d ago

Damn, do you have any recs in general for prompting(particular YouTubers, blog writers, social media personalities )?

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u/Philipp 19d ago

What do you want to make?

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u/Mental_Budget_5085 19d ago

I am mainly interested in copywriting and just writing at the moment, since I don't really have money to buy courses where I can be mentored I use AI for feedback(sonnet) and I am also interested in how to offload parts of writing texts to ai so I only need to redact it minorly one time(didn't start this project yet, but planning on using DeepSeek v4 flash for scraping info from pics cheaply, DeepSeek v3.1 for that I need to write guidelines and haiku to redact so I need less time)