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0 pointsjmkni5mo ago0 comments

Different prompts/approaches?

I "grew up", as it were, on StackOverflow, when I was in my early dev days and didn't have a clue what I was doing I asked question after question on SO and learned very quickly the difference between asking a good question vs asking a bad one

There is a great Jon Skeet blog post from back in the day called "Writing the perfect question" - https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-...

I think this is as valid as ever in the age of AI, you will get much better output from any of these chatbots if you learn and understand how to ask a good question.

0 comments

Spooky235mo ago

Great point. I'd add that one way to get improved performance is to ask Gemini/ChatGPT to write the prompt for you. For software, have it write a spec. It's easier to tweak something that is already pretty comprehensive.

whatever15mo ago

Sure but if one is bad at asking questions they would be consistently bad across chatbots

sanxiyn5mo ago

Yes, but in fact compensating for bad questions is a skill, and in my experience it is a skill excelled by Claude and poorly by Gemini.

In other words, better you are at prompting (eg you write a half page of prompt even for casual uses -- believe or not, such people do exist -- prompt length is in practice a good proxy of prompting skill), more you will like (or at least get better results with) Gemini over Claude.

This isn't necessarily good for Gemini because being easy to use is actually quite important, but it does mean Gemini is considerably underrated for what it can do.

irthomasthomas5mo ago

More likely just different tasks. The frontier is jagged.

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