Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.

Metaprompting

Sep 20, 2025 | AI

Dharmesh’s post made me realize there’s a name for something I’ve been doing implicitly for a while—using AI to help me write better prompts. Strictly speaking, that’s AI-assisted prompt refinement. There’s a closely related idea called metaprompting—writing prompts that generate other prompts—which also makes a real difference, especially for deeper research.

These omniscient models have been trained on nearly everything ever written, and prompts are how we tap into that knowledge. With GPT-5, the average prompt clocks in at around 50 tokens (roughly 35–40 words)—so every word counts.

I built a custom GPT to refine prompts (and, when needed, to generate reusable prompts—i.e., metaprompting). It’s available here. Naturally, I used AI to help write its instructions (meta-metaprompting, anyone?). If you try it, I’d love suggestions to improve its performance.

P.S. If you want a crisp explainer of metaprompting itself, this glossary entry is good: What is Meta Prompting? (AI21 Labs).