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How To Use an LLM Without Selling Your Soul
A guide for busy writers
Around April of 2024, I was stuck in a terrifying situation for a technical writer: in need of a review and not a soul available to provide one. I had less than a month to finalize documentation for a complex product that didn’t even exist the prior December. Meanwhile, the subject matter experts were all busy subjecting matters to their expertise and anyone capable of a didactic review was thoroughly preoccupied. We were all frantically patching together a plane as it jockeyed down the runway, praying that the damn thing would take flight.
And so, in a fit of desperation, I found myself pleading with ChatGPT for an honest and professional review. Prompting a large language model (LLM) is spooky business. LLMs don’t think — not in the way you or I do, or, for that matter, any other biological organism inhabiting this mudball. How does one even communicate with such a thing? Brushing aside my trepidations, I decided to treat ChatGPT like a human:
Please review the following document for the provided target audience and
stated objectives.
TARGET AUDIENCE:
Data engineers familiar with Python, SQL, and the Snowflake Data Cloud.
OBJECTIVES:
1) Set up a local development environment and install the RelationalAI
(RAI) Python package.
2) Provide a good mental model for…
