I used to write detailed prompts. Now I find the benefits of strategic ambiguity — rather than speaking imperatively, I emphasize my vision and then Claude can often figure out a method.

This doesn’t always work better. But often enough.

That's actually what I do too. What I was trying to say is that my prompts are precise in the sense that whether they're vaguely ambiguous or hyper-detailed and highly directive it's always very intentional to improve the response in the direction I want. The difference can have significant impact as shown in research on how LLMs naturally mirror user's prompts.

I noticed this last year and started experimenting which led to several realizations about how my prompt's tone, style, length, format, word choices and even punctuation can have very counter-intuitive impact on model responses. It's not that one strategy always gets "better" results, they're just different in specific ways, which can make one input style better for one context but worse for another. I first noticed this effect when modding my user prompt so major topic headings would always be numbered. It's surprisingly difficult to get it to reliably use the same simple scheme due to various potential ambiguities. So, I spent a little time word-smithing, lawyering and tuning the prompt but I found the closer I got to full compliance on heading numbering, the more unrelated things would drift. Like it would just stop using bullets, even though I never mentioned anything about bullets.

Then I changed the prompt to "Change nothing about your default formatting, except headings." But just mentioning anything related to formatting, could suddenly cause unintended effects on seemingly unrelated things. Then I tried being explicitly directive about all formatting to just lock it down. And this completely failed because once the formatting was perfect, I started noticing the model's output would get less intelligent much earlier in sessions. So I cleared my user prompt entirely as it wasn't worth the cognitive cost on the model or my time. A few days later in a long session I noticed it was numbering everything perfectly with no prompt at all. When I scrolled back through I saw it didn't start out numbering its responses. It started doing it because I was consistently numbering every major concept in my inputs, even though I never mentioned numbering or formatting.

So... yeah, subtle differences in prompts which absolutely shouldn't matter, do impact model output in unexpected ways. And, as of now, these effects can only be fully suppressed with strong directive prompts for short periods, but doing so always impacts other unrelated things - and has some cognitive impact on model performance. So, by paying a little attention, I've discovered ways to optimize a model's output in the direction I need by shifting not only my prompt's explicit directives but also the subliminal meta-elements like tone, style, length, structure, formatting, etc.

Yeah, I find the back and forth with Claude is often better than trying to front load everything in a massive and detailed prompt.