85 Cognitive Patterns — The Library I Wish Had Existed Three Years Ago
· 5 min read
When I first started using LLMs seriously for work, I noticed something that took me a while to articulate. The same question, asked slightly differently, would get radically different quality answers. And when I looked at what "slightly differently" actually meant in the cases that worked, I kept seeing the same thing: structure.
The best prompts I wrote weren't better because of their vocabulary. They were better because they embedded a reasoning methodology. They told the LLM not just what to do but how to think about the problem.
The issue was that I had to reinvent that structure from scratch every time.