Lenny Distilled

Context is everything in AI communication

Craft → Product Sense

Context is all you need. Context is the only thing that matters. It's such an important piece of getting a language model to do anything for you.

Logan KilpatrickInside OpenAI
Supporting

My whole position on this is prompt engineering is a very human thing. When we want to get some value out of a human, we do this prompt engineering. We try to effectively communicate with that human in order to get the best output.

Logan KilpatrickInside OpenAI
Supporting

Crap in crap out. If you ask a pretty basic question, you're going to get a pretty basic response. And actually the same thing is true for humans, and you can think of a great example of this. When I go to another human and I ask, 'How's your day going,' they say, 'It's going pretty good.'

Logan KilpatrickInside OpenAI
Supporting

Studies have shown that using bad prompts can get you down to 0% on a problem, and good prompts can boost you up to 90%.

Sander SchulhoffAI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn't
With caveats

What we usually find when we try to ask an LLM to do this error analysis is it just says the trace looks good because it doesn't have the context needed to understand whether something might be bad product smell or not.

Hamel Husain & Shreya ShankarWhy AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders