iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

When you prompt AI with a vague prompt, it will not push back. It will not work through edge cases and suggest improvements to the requirements. It will only do what you tell it to and say "this look right, boss?" At *best* you now need a long QA process to understand what the AI actually made.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

But managers who are used to chucking vague ideas at their teams and relying on expertise to connect the dots don't know how to do QA. So you get one of two situations: - The output is obviously wrong. Good luck articulating *how* to the machine. - The output is subtly wrong. Good luck finding how!

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Of course, even if you can overcome these three problems you run up against another constraint: the AI is not a genie, and your prompt is not a wish. It can and will generate outputs in direct contravention to what you asked it to do. And it will break formerly-working outputs when asked to iterate.

Pavel@spavel.bsky.social

The literal genie is a very common trope: when you "make a wish" you get exactly what you wish for. This is one of the explicit limits on the spell Wish from D&D - often called the most powerful spell in the game because its effect is "make a wish and it comes true." (this is a thread about tech)

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