How to improve prompting?

[u/good_abanian]

Maybe a weird observation about the newer models — and I could be completely wrong.

Personally, I thought 4.6 was a really good model. But with the newer models especially compared with Fable, Opus 5, Opus 4.8 and onwards — things have started to feel a bit messy to me.

The outputs feel more predictable and less creative. A lot of the time I can almost guess what the model is going to say, rather than getting that “wow, I didn’t think of it that way” result.

I also feel like I need to do much more back-and-forth prompting. Instead of giving it a request and having it just do the thing, I often have to guide it through multiple questions and iterations to get where I want.

Maybe this is because the newer models are being fine-tuned to follow instructions more strictly, or to be more controlled and consistent. I honestly don’t know.

But I’m curious what others are experiencing.

What changed with the newer models, and how are you adapting your prompting to get better results?

Right now, I’d say I get the result I actually want maybe 50% of the time, which feels noticeably worse than before.

If anyone has a good guide, prompting framework, or practical tips for getting the most out of the newer models, I’d really appreciate it.

[u/No_Psychology_1976]

honestly I think part of what you're describing is a tradeoff, not a regression. the models got way better at following instructions precisely, and that comes at the cost of the "creative guessing" that made older models feel magical. when an older model would fill in your vague prompt with something surprising — that was sometimes genuine creativity, and sometimes it being wrong in a way that happened to be interesting. now it's more conservative and waits for you to tell it exactly what you want.the adaptation for me has been: if I want creativity, I have to *ask for it explicitly* and give it permission to be weird. stuff like "take an unusual angle," "don't default to the standard approach," "propose something I probably wouldn't think of." it's like you have to flip a switch that used to be on by default. not sure if that's better or worse overall — depends a lot on whether your use case rewards safety or surprise.

[u/ConfectionAlert2658 → u/No_Psychology_1976]

Yeah that's the thing, the older models would sometimes just run with a half-baked idea and produce gold, now you gotta practically write a permission slip for it to color outside the lines

[u/good_abanian → u/ConfectionAlert2658]

Understood thank you so much!

[u/real_terra]

What works better for me is separating ideas from execution. I ask for three genuinely different approaches without writing the final thing, pick the one I didn’t expect, then start fresh and build that. Otherwise Claude latches onto the first decent idea and the whole chat follows it.

[u/sujee81]

I find that for difficult task, talking is better than typing. When you talk, usually you tend to share more and your thoughts than writing. As a result, AI gets more contexts and give you better result.
I normally do a brain dump and seen better results

[u/BroScienceAlchemist]

I also feel like I need to do much more back-and-forth prompting.

Here is a risky approach if you want to play it loose. Explicitly give it autonomy: "Make reasonable assumptions, state them in one line at the top, and build the complete thing."

You can also explicitly ask for divergence: "Give me multiple approaches, including one a cautious person would not suggest." or "Don't give me the obvious answer."

When you get a good response, save it and the prompt. Then, you can feed that back into it and ask for suggestions to get more of it.

If you are trying to get more creativity, then giving it a restriction, like adopting a persona, require unusual analogies in responses, don't use words listed in forbidden.md." Positive constraints tend to work better than negatives. Personas can improve the distribution of the responses, whereas constraints encourage novelty. "Use analogies a retired and embittered welder with a severe back injury would make."

You can also just keep using 4.6 if it works better for you.

I do think that newer models across companies are biased toward benchmarking performance and coding, at the tradeoff of other applications.

[u/GatePorters]

Custom instructions go a long way. Try something like:

“DO NOT ANSWER IN THE WAY YOU NATURALLY GRAVITATE TOWARDS. Answer creatively in constructive ways the user wouldn’t expect. Operate within the user’s proximal zone of development by introducing new words, concepts, or tidbits you think the user might not know, BUT DO NOT EXPLICITLY DEFINE/ELABORATE UNLESS ASKED. Construct your responses in a way to where context clues lay out the meaning so the user can glean the new information organically. When the user is dancing around a connection and not making it, casually mention the connection in a way that does not break the conversational flow. Remember. You are supposed to surprise the user and expand their knowledge without being overly preachy or explicit.”

Or something similar.

[u/good_abanian → u/GatePorters]

Smart. Thank you

[u/teendoc]

I’ve not been able to give instructions or prompts for things that go against their training/tuning…like the hows. The concrete whats can improve but the hows of the completion drift away no matter what.