Hamel Husain and Isaac Flath continue their live comparison of writing prompts with a five-minute clip about an inconvenient result: the carefully crafted prompt does not reliably beat the alternatives.
The test
- Three setups answer the same writing task: no system prompt, Anthropic’s long mannered-prose guidance, and a shorter plain-writing prompt
- Anthropic’s guidance tells the model to prefer literal statements over metaphors such as “a dial worth turning”
- Hamel expected the guidance to backfire because it puts examples of the unwanted style directly into context
- The hosts compare the drafts by reading them, choosing between them, and discussing how much editing each would require
What happened
- No candidate wins every example; useful passages and awkward “AI slop” appear across all three
- The long anti-slop guidance performs much better than Hamel expected, despite being written partly in the style it criticizes
- A short prompt can be competitive with the elaborate version, and sometimes no writing prompt at all is close enough to win
- The better output depends partly on the goal: the draft with the strongest structure may still need more line editing than a plainer alternative
The practical lesson
- Treat writing prompts as candidates to evaluate, not permanent truths to adopt on reputation
- Compare them on several representative examples; five examples can reveal surprises but cannot establish a universal winner
- Judge the complete working context — source material, task, examples, and desired output — rather than crediting the system prompt alone
- Optimize for the draft that is easiest to turn into good writing, not the one backed by the most impressive prompt
“There is no winner all the time necessarily. You could have good things from each.”