Prompt Anxiety

A friend of mine, David M. Berry, recently wrote a great short essay called "Prompt Anxiety".

He reframes prompting not as engineering, but as an intuitive practice that feels closer to gambling than software design. Prompting, he suggests, is becoming a new kind of computational game where you carefully set up your move, then hit "send"—a moment that transforms preparation into a roll of the dice.

Like gambling, where many develop rituals to influence the outcomes, prompting also becomes superstitious. You reuse the same phrase that worked last time, avoid words that "jinxed" a previous response, tweak and re-tweak with magical thinking. All because we're dealing with probabilistic machines while expecting we can control the outcome.

This tension between our desire for predictability and the inherently probablisitc nature of these systems creates a fascinating psychological space.