Prompting is a high-skill craft built on a mental model of Claude

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 17:39

   What are best practices for getting the most out of Cloud Code? The meta skill, I say, is prompting is very important. you know and like that like i think this is like not trivial to say because i think a lot of people are like oh prompting doesn't matter it's just like i can just say a sentence and cloud will do it and i think prompting is really this like this it's like public speaking you know like or writing or something and for a specific audience and that audience is cloud and you need to like build a mental model of cloud and how it thinks and how it works right and so that's like the most important skill in working with cloud code is like having this mental model right of cloud and like what it can do well what it can one shot what it can't and so so many people when you see prompting

2. 18:25

   they're just like they're short prompts but they have such a good mental model of cloud and of like the code base and things like that that like it's effortless you know what i mean but it's like high skill ceiling so like that work of like you know spending a lot of time prompting and building mental models of how you know an intuition for how the agents work is really important and then i think like the next thing is like the unknown stuff we talked about earlier where it's like being able to find out like your what you don't know or what you haven't written down um learning about like different things i think as claude can do more and more things the likelihood of you doing something out of distribution for you and like you have low domain knowledge on is very very high you know and the more you can like learn the vocabulary

3. 19:13

   to be able to prompt Claude, it becomes really important. And so I think the most important unknowns are the unknown unknowns, where you're like, I just don't even know that this exists, right? Yeah, exactly. I think that's an illustration of the map and the territory, right? Where you're like, okay, this is my prompt, and the territory is the actual work that the agent needs to do, right? And if you are very precise, you can give more precise things, right?

4. 19:37

   So for example, in design, I'm not very precise. I'm not a designer. so I say give me eight different mockups. But if I was a designer, maybe I'd be like, oh, hey, here's some reference sites. I want this type of font and this type of look to it, and here's a few different components to visualize. Here's a Figma board to bring in. And so you can just be so much more precise with that language. And if you're not a designer, you just need to try and learn the language, basically, or learn the unknown unknowns.

5. 20:07

   and that's true of like everything I think like the more like you can work with Claude to learn like how things work the better your prompting will be I think another good example of this is like game design you know like where a lot of people are like oh like I can vibe code a game now and they're like it's not fun