Double Your Impact with AI by Pair Prompting
Roger Mitchell
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While entertaining two guests over the weekend, a discussion about their feelings of being overloaded with personal and professional challenges led to an interesting insight into how AI can be applied to unlock different perspectives.
Imagine you're with a friend or partner and each of you are at a fork in the road. There are multiple paths to pursue, none of which have "one way doors", in the sense that you're committed to whatever you choose.
How do you decide which path to pursue? And, should you pursue any of the paths at all?
Historically, we have approached challenges like this by listing:
Assumptions and constraints
Expected outcomes with pros and cons
Criteria for when to quit
These are all compiled based on our knowledge and outputs from discussions with mentors, colleagues, friends, etc. However, those discussions are also fraught with bias from how we position our knowledge.
How can we approach these challenges differently?
Pair prompting, which is similar to pair programming, a concept from software engineering where two people will sit at the same computer to write code: one writes while the other observes, and then the roles switch every so often during the same session.
Here are the five steps to make your first pair prompting session productive:
Grab your other half, which could be your boss, coworker, friend, or whomever (depending on what you're solving)
Start a new chat with generative AI
Provide as much context as possible in your initial prompt, including a summary of the challenge, what you have discussed thus far, and details about the two of you
Iteratively reflect on AI's responses as you continue the discussion, which may include conflicting perspectives (e.g. I think X while my partner thinks Y)
Try techniques that escape reality like asking AI to revise its answer if constraints were changed or to work backwards from a future state
By collaborating together and adding AI's ability to process multiple perspectives with an immense amount of knowledge, you stand to benefit from seeing both the challenge and potential solutions differently.
TLDR: Don't solve problems with AI alone. Working as a pair leads to better prompts, deeper insights, and a variety of practical solutions.