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A practical, living list of best practices for mastering large language models, all field-tested by Tim Warner. See more at go.techtrainertim.com/laws.

Warner’s Laws of Generative AI

Visit TechTrainerTim.com

A practical, living list of best practices for mastering large language models. Field-tested by Tim Warner.

🔗 Public Gist: go.techtrainertim.com/laws

These "laws" are in no particular order and evolve as the tech and our workflows change.


  • 🧠 Anything Unstated Gets Inferred
    If you leave something out of your prompt, the AI will guess, and not always how you want.

  • ✂️ Sculpt Context, Don’t Pollute It
    Feed the AI only what matters. Be surgical. Trim background noise, legacy docs, and side chatter.

  • 🧪 A/B Test Your AI Daily Drivers
    Maintain at least two paid LLMs. Compare answers, cross-check facts, and swap when one stumbles.

  • 🛩️ Pilot’s Chair Rule
    You drive. The AI is your copilot, not your boss. Never let the model decide the mission or mark its own homework.

  • 🔒 Protect Privacy Ruthlessly
    Never enter personal or confidential info into public or free AIs. Know your chat storage, licensing, and usage stats.

  • 🎤 Lean Into Multimodal
    Use voice, text, images—whatever lets you express your needs fastest and clearest. Don’t limit yourself to typing.

  • 🗺️ Prompt Procedurally, Think in Steps
    Break problems down step by step. Guide the AI like you’d mentor a human: who, what, when, where, why, how.

  • 🕵️‍♂️ Watch for Amnesia and Hallucination
    When the AI forgets or fabricates, call it out. Keep a backup LLM for fault tolerance and groundedness.

  • 🔄 Meta-Prompt and System-Prompt
    Ask the AI to refine your own prompts, summarize, or focus its response. Use meta-layer instructions for precision.

  • 🏛️ Use Pillar Jumping
    Leverage insights from one LLM session to nudge or challenge another. Good answers get sharper in dialogue.


Bonus:

  • 📝 Never Treat AI as an Oracle
    Every AI answer is a draft. Validate, edit, and own the final output.

Authored by Tim Warner
TechTrainerTim.comgo.techtrainertim.com/laws

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