More than once I've found myself going down this 'little maze of twisty passages, all alike'. At some point I stop, collect up the chain of prompts in the conversation, and curate them into a net new prompt that should be a bit better. Usually I make better progress - at least for a while.
This becomes second nature after a while. I've developed an intuition about when a model loses the plot and when to start a new thread. I have a base prompt I keep for the current project I'm working on, and then I ask the model to summarize what we've done in the thread and combine them to start anew.
I can't wait until this is a solved problem because it does slow me down.
What do you find difficult about distilling your own prompts?
After any back and forth session I have reasonably good results asking something like "Given this workflow, how could I have prompted this better from the start to get the same results?"
