The Prompting of: The Foldable Tractatus

TL;DRIn August I published the Foldable Tractatus, an open-source web app that lets you wade through Ludwig Wittgenstein's first book in a very unusual way. Today I'm releasing all the prompts I used to build it with AI, plus a detailed analysis of the process.Spoiler: AI output does not have to be slop. I'm interested in AI only as a tool to enhance thought. Unfortunately, almost all of the discourse about the power of LLMs is about how to use them to avoid having to think: the amazing things these new models can one-shot (i.e. create with just one brief initial prompt), the loops and the graphs and the factories... everything is publicized as a way to hand off as much of the work as possible to a bunch of GPUs in the cloud, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. None of those techniques is bad in itself (I use most of them!), but I think the way we talk about them is giving a lot of people the wrong impression. I suspect this is part of the reason why researchers find…

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