Attention Is the New Big-O: A Systems Design Approach to Prompt Engineering
5 days ago
- #Prompt Engineering
- #Attention Mechanism
- #LLM Optimization
- Attention in LLMs is a mechanism that calculates relationships between all words in a text simultaneously, influencing how the model processes and generates responses.
- Structured prompts with clear, hierarchical sections and numbered steps leverage the attention mechanism more effectively than unstructured, flat prompts.
- Key heuristics for effective prompt engineering include leading with the most important information, using clear structure and sections, assigning personas for behavior guidance, and being specific to avoid attention drift.
- Understanding and optimizing for attention in prompts can lead to more reliable, well-structured outputs, faster feedback loops, and more efficient use of the model's context window.
- Attention literacy is compared to algorithmic literacy, emphasizing the importance of directing a model's attention precisely for economic and performance advantages in AI-assisted development.