My Surprisingly Effective Follow-Ups File

I've been holding back on sharing this until I could present this more fully, but let's YOLO it.

I’ve been working on a set of moves recently to help average people up their LLM game. The idea is to come up with simple habits that can be applied somewhat mechanistically to get “30 seconds smarter” about things. In my mind there is a big unmet need between people writing long well thought-out prompts and people descending into arguing with LLMs (or not following up at all).

The new approach will serve that need by showing a method that can be taught to students to make them substantially better at prompting without doing the whole context-engineering thing. (Yep, echoes of the SIFT philosophy of simple things to do).

This is not the post introducing that approach.

This is the post where I somewhat wearily realize I keep putting off that post, which means I never introduce a core part of it — my Surprisingly Effective Follow-Ups File. And I give it all to you to play with, while I find time to write a post showing you how to use it effectively.

Link to SEF Page

Larger posts more framework focused within a few weeks on this, I promise.