Act II — Uncomfortable
Now imagine you did this twelve times in a row.
"You are an expert at X." (Assumes it can become something it isn't by being told it already is.)
"Think step by step." (Assumes knowing the procedure produces the right steps.)
"Be thorough." (Assumes it knows what thorough means for your specific unstated goal.)
"Double check your work." (Assumes it has a ground truth to check against.)
"Don't hallucinate." (Assumes it can tell the difference between confabulation and recall.)
You built a 12-story building on a foundation of assumptions.
Each step assumes the last one worked. None of them are grounded in anything. And this is the architecture that an entire industry sells courses, newsletters, and frameworks about.
The prompt engineers aren't frauds. Some of those patterns genuinely increase the probability of useful outputs. But they're stacking heuristics on top of other heuristics, calling it engineering, and selling it as control.
It's not control. It's informed coin-flipping.