Comment by Sammi

Here's my best advice of prompt engineering for hard problems. Always funnel out and then funnel in. Let me explain.

State your concrete problem and context. Then we funnel out by asking the AI to do a thorough analysis and investigate all the possible options and approaches for solving the issue. Ask it to go search the web for all possible relevant information. And now we start funneling in again by asking it to list the pros and cons of each approach. Finally we asked it to choose which one or two solutions are the most relevant to our problem at hand.

For easy problems you can just skip all of this and just ask directly because it'll know and it'll answer.

The issue with harder problems is that if you just ask it directly to come up with a solution then it'll just make something up and it will make up reasons for why it'll work. You need to ground it in reality first.

So you do: contrete context and problem, thorough analysis of options, list pros and cons, and pick a winner.