Reflections

Most prompt engineering guides follow a rigid structure: define the assistant’s role, outline the task, specify constraints, and close with examples. Something like: You are a behavioral science expert. Analyze the following user feedback. Provide summaries with clear themes and count frequency of key comments. If the comments are unclear, ask clarifying questions. That format works fine in many cases. But it’s not how I prompt - at least that’s now how I prompt now that I’ve talked extensively with this version of the ChatGPT. I’ve told it my interests and fed in a good deal of my writing. As such, my prompting is more conversational since this model is already trained on the way I think. ...

I hated playing the piano. I really did. I had no talent for it, and compounding my lack of talent was my complete lack of interest. Naturally, I did not spend a lot of time practicing. There was a problem though. Every Tuesday we’d have to go for our weekly piano lessons with Mrs. Lin. I was going to be exposed as I had most likely not practiced all week. This also meant that, if we were going home directly after the lesson, my mother was going to be pretty angry. ...

After that dinner, I did something I hadn’t planned: I started asking around. Not to argue. Not to debate. Just to understand where people stood on DEI. And what I heard surprised me—sometimes more than the dinner itself. Some echoed my classmates almost word for word: “I want the best person for the job. I don’t care if my fireman is diverse—I care if he can put out a fire.” ...

When I got home that night, I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation in my head. Not just the words, but the way they were said—the confidence, the condescension, the complete dismissal of any nuance. I was caught off guard in the moment, but the more I thought about it, the clearer it became: the arguments weren’t just flawed—they were rigged from the start. They hadn’t come to discuss DEI. They came to discredit it. And worse, they framed it in a way that made it impossible to defend without first unpicking their definitions. ...

This was a few weeks ago – I was out to dinner with a few friends of mine from high school. Naturally, the topic of politics came up. It was mere weeks after Trump 2.0 took office, and already, years of progress were being rapidly dismantled. One of the first casualties was DEI. A single man in power had managed to undo years—decades, really—of goodwill, hard-won policy, and cultural shift. And yet, to my surprise, people weren’t mourning that loss. They were cheering it. ...

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a space to just share things publicly, without worrying about algorithms or feeling like I’m handing my privacy to Facebook. ...