Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered us to interact with AI agents to get quick, effective answers to a wide range of questions. Given their power and the flexibility of asking specific questions to get personalized responses, it helps to leverage them to further the goals of this project.
My initial approach to leverage these models was to attempt to build a custom AI agent to be the official chatbot of the project. After a fair amount of effort to build such a custom chatbot, I figured it is not the right time to undertake this effort. The pace of innovation in this space is proceeding at a dizzying pace. Every week one of the major companies (Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama etc) publishes a major update, often with new innovations. As a result, any custom project that is trying to provide a chatbot for general topics quickly loses its relevance and is outdated before it is completed. A custom chatbot would still be a great approach if you are dealing with proprietary data, such as your bank’s chatbot that is offering you customer service based on your bank account. But a custom chatbot dealing with general topics such as the economy or personal finances has to expend a lot of time and effort just to stay relevant in the face of rapid innovation from massive companies.
A better approach is to focus my energy on helping you make better use of these publicly available LLM powered AI agents. I’ll start with some high level prompts that you can copy/paste into any of the above AI chatbots and get a simple, readable response on any topic of your choice. Over time, I plan to publish prompts for specific topics that you could adopt to your use. These prompts will be published as blog articles and also organized in one convenient place.
Let’s start of with a few high level simple prompts. Copy the prompt into your clipboard by clicking on the copy icon (two tiny overlapping squares to the right of the text), but be sure to plug in your topic before submitting the prompt to your AI chatbot.
Master a New Concept Quickly
I need to understand <insert concept> as quickly as possible. Break it down into simple, digestible chunks that I can grasp in 10 minutes or less.Examples of concepts this works well for: “social security”, “mortgage loan”
Do Deep Research with Key Insights
I'm researching <insert topic>. Provide me with key insights, summaries, and the most important data from reliable sources to save time.Examples of concepts this works well for: “how to effectively use Medicare”, “how to reduce my debt quickly”
Do Deep Research using A Simple Project’s Perspective
I want a deep understanding of <insert complex topic>. Assume that I have minimal understanding of the topic. Produce a detailed article of at least <N> words using 1) first principles to identify important foundations, 2) analogies to explain complicated concepts to make them easier to understand, 3) point out sources of common confusion so I can avoid confusion, 4) simple language understood by someone with a high school education, 5) where relevant, show a picture to illustrate a concept.Examples of concepts this works well for: “the US economy”, “how a car works”. Use N = 1000, or 1500 if the GPT you are using can generate long responses.
Happy researching!
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