McAteer: Use coding assistants to bootstrap structured prompts from raw brainstorms
Dan McAteer · OpenAI o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) · Jan 17, 2025 · at 28:43
Dan McAteer discusses practical OpenAI o1 prompt engineering workflows on the Latent Space podcast, responding to feedback about the friction of authoring long prompt specifications.
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“What I do, and I think what you should do is use other prompts to sort of bootstrap your prompts. So like I have it set up in cursor or in windsurf where I was telling Alessio before we started, you basically, I have like a prompt template in a prompts directory and I'll just say, Hey, windsurf, Create a prompt and I'll just dump a brainstorm of that idea. And then now it has Ben structure. So we'll use the Ben's template, the structure of that like O one prompt, and it will generate for me just based on my like high level thoughts, my brainstorm, like a fleshed out prompt that follows that structure.”
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