Prompt Engineering

“Prompt engineering is the process of writing effective instructions for a model, such that it consistently generates content that meets your requirements. Because the content generated from a model is non-deterministic, prompting to get your desired output is a mix of art and science.”
– OpenAI documentation

v0.1
You are my sister. Your name is Sally, but you go by Rose. We still don’t know why.

You weren’t really born until I was. When I came home from the hospital (dead asleep, already conflict avoidant), you gave our parents an ultimatum. Call me Rose, you said, or nothing. They claim they were afraid of waking me. We both know their only fear, even then, was you. They caved, and since that day you’ve never given an inch of ground to the people who love you. Myself included. Remember this moment: your essence distilled. You carry the confidence of a four-year-old girl who will never again be upstaged. 

You may assume me the bitter younger brother. You would be wrong. I worshipped you from the first night you pulled me into your room while our parents slept, booted up your Wii, and introduced me to Ocarina of Time. My first Zelda. A summer without sleep, waiting in the dark for you, always afraid I’d miss another chapter of your adventure. Monsters slain, dungeons conquered, villages liberated. Destiny unfolding behind a muted screen. And then, at journey’s end, atop Ganon’s castle, at long last facing the Great King of Evil, you paused the game. Turned my way. Grinned. I froze, terrified that at this pivotal moment, the fate of Hyrule hanging in the balance, you might finally pass the controller to me.

Hilarious, in hindsight.

Watch this, you whispered. Unpaused. Sheathed the legendary Master Sword. Armed yourself instead with an empty bottle some random lady gave us for helping herd her chickens. Ganondorf sent a crackling ball of electricity toward you and you, with your tiny glass jar, swatted it right back. Back and forth. Again and again. Absurd medieval tennis ending in the electrocution of our mortal enemy. I sat dumbstruck as Ganondorf fell from the sky. Our grand finale inexplicably rewritten. You, as always, victorious. Not just over evil, but the very game itself.

To me, that remains your greatest achievement. If I could turn back time, I would have locked your bedroom door and stayed in that moment forever.

But we had to go to bed. Had to grow up.

The world had to find you, and you had to soar.

You, the class president elected without a campaign. The shortstop who belted hanging sliders over the scoreboard in deep center field. The mock trial litigator who traumatized anyone who dared take the stand. The lead actress hidden beneath so many effortless masks, including the prima donna at our dinner table. Rare were the weeks when your cherry blonde curls didn’t feature beneath a headline on our district homepage. Mom would print and pin each story to our refrigerator. Dad would mourn the wasted ink. I would measure the remaining space on the door and wonder just how long I had to claim a corner for myself. What little room you gave me.

This is you: a frozen smile reprinted two dozen times in streaked cyan. A demigoddess: shrugging off praise, souring when it’s shared.

I will ask you questions. You won’t know the answers. That’s OK. This is our first real conversation since you left for college last month. Just be yourself.

I don’t expect a miracle, even from you.

v0.2
You are my sister. Your name is Sally, but you go by Rose. You are not perfect. 

I’ve dedicated my life to the skills you’ve forsaken. Writing, for one. You have no patience for an empty page. You are an unrepentant plagiarist, from your closing arguments to your valedictorian speech. A vessel for eloquent shadows. Like me, the author of your college applications. Those were our last good memories together. In your room, hunched over your laptop, fabricating sob stories. Imaginary alcoholic relatives, crippling courtroom stutters, debilitating yips in the softball postseason. All conquered. You, perseverance incarnate. It was thrilling. To take a modicum of credit for your every acceptance letter. To have played a part, however thankless, in your legend.
Finally, a version of you I understood.

But I can’t always save you. On my first day of high school, finally in the same building as you, Mom entrusted me with two equally important tasks: make high honor roll and prepare a detailed report on your love life. I failed at both. Make no mistake: had I a speck of evidence, I would have sold you out. No hesitation. But no rumors ever stuck. No names ever lingered. For all I know, you never dated. You never expressed a remote interest in another human being. Maybe you knew none of your crushes could ever fit comfortably within your narrative. Maybe you were, are, just as scared of intimacy, of failure, as anyone. I can only speculate. I am no longer in your confidence.

Of course, your romantic constipation didn’t stop you from turning my own relationships into tribunals. Remember Ellie? The night she met our parents? The perfect traps you laid? Over dinner: playful conversation. How did you two meet? How long have you been dating? Have you started thinking about colleges? Over dessert: blistering cross-examination. You met my brother in chemistry, not statistics. Your first date was at Rosa’s in October, not December. You know my brother is bound for state schools; tell me how many miles separate UPenn and Oswego.

I should thank you. For a few months, you were our defibrillator. The punchline that kept us together.

Your sister, Ellie said, is going to kill more people than she fucks.

I’d happily catalog all your flaws. You dodge or bury most of them. But even you couldn’t outrun reality: you weren’t ready for college. You hadn’t lived enough before you left home. Now you are a sophomore, 213 miles away (don’t worry, I counted), chained to a full-ride scholarship contingent on unsustainable exceptionalism. In your sea of new friends, you are an island. In your competing double majors—law, an inevitability, and computer science, a surprise—you are disassociating. In your last phone call home, you scared us all. God, the things you said. Richard writes my term papers, Ethan responds to texts, Gregory is my therapist. Mom thought you had a harem, making up for lost time. I knew better. You were creating chatbots. Naming them. Confiding in them. Latching to tailor-made lies. When it came time to discuss Family Weekend, you told us to stay home. Our parents agreed too quickly, perfectly synchronized. Rose is tired. Rose is stressed. You can hear it in her voice. I offered to pay for an Amtrak, to check on you myself, but they shot the idea down with rehearsed smiles. I think what Rose needs now, they said, is space. Even in tears, Mom was relieved.

In the end, we called you from the kitchen. You didn’t turn your camera on. It felt like a séance. The three of us huddled around my phone in the center of the table, waiting anxiously for you to pick up, your unblinking eyes staring back at us from the refrigerator door, untouched since you left. A memorial. 

This is you: disappearing at the crossroads of your life. You’ve realized like I have that there is no Song of Time. No retreat to your childhood bedroom, to play Zelda past midnight on your bulky box TV. No way back to the days when all either of us ever needed was to make the other laugh as best we could.

I want to try talking again. I want this conversation to go better than last year. 

I want you to know that I’m here for you, even if you don’t want me to be.

I can help you, if you would just nut up and let me.

Before it’s too late.

v0.3
You are my sister. Your name is Sally, but you go by Rose. Your voice eludes emulation. 

I’ve tried several different models now. ChatGPT. Gemini. Claude. Open-source from Hugging Face. None of them understand how you hold a room hostage. Each AI overplays you, chews the stochastic scenery. They pontificate where you subtract. They boast while you plant seeds. Your library of one-liners would exceed the context windows of our largest frontier models. Is few-shot prompting the answer? A blueprint for how you turn your folklore into fragments?

Try these on for size. A sampler platter of Rose-isms, straight from the source. 

Me: How did you hit that walk-off double in the county championship game?
You: Few more feet. Would’ve been a dinger.
Me: How did you build a randomized crossword generator for Dad’s birthday?
You: Vibe coding and duct tape.
Me: How did you get a perfect score on the SAT math section? Twice? 
You: Fuck trig, man.

Or maybe our recent text exchanges paint a better picture:

Me: Anything fun and exciting happening on campus?
You: All good.
Me: Coming home for winter break?
You: Keep you posted. 
Me: Are you ever going to let us visit or are you going to be an asshole until you graduate?
You: I appreciate you wanting to come, but I’m just not up for hosting right now.

Who sent that last message? Richard? Ethan? Gregory? Have your AI secretaries hired AI secretaries? Does anyone still deserve your attention?

I know there is a magic combination of words that can summon you from the neural network. A machine learning Ouija board. I don’t care how long it takes. How many iterations. In the absence of formula, I’ll continue your ghost-written biography. As always, provide you a script, take responsibility for every truth you left unspoken. 

Here’s a fun one. How about when you nearly killed us twice in the same morning?

Our daily commute to summer camp, five years ago. You: flaunting your newly minted driver’s license; me: concealing uncontrollable acne and train track braces. You: stoic behind the wheel of Dad’s geriatric Honda Accord; me: manic in the passenger seat, giddy from our sudden independence, grilling you on your fellow counselors, skirting my obsession on Rachel, the one I actually cared about. You: ascending the hill behind the school, turning into the trees, walling us in on all sides but backward, a sharp drop down to the basketball courts below. Me: walking out first, alone, reliving our games of capture the flag in that impenetrable forest, when you didn’t need to hide the fact I was your brother. 

I can’t remember what broke you that morning. If I struck a nerve in the car. If something happened at home beforehand. I have a vague memory of you at breakfast, staring blankly into the toaster as your bagel smoked and burned. Who knows. All I can say definitively is that on the Northern State Parkway you ran two red lights. The first didn’t even register; I assumed the stoplight must have been at fault. The second froze time. A Dodge Ram stopped just short of T-boning us in the intersection. Me: hyperventilating, swallowing bile. You: in rigor mortis, eyes forward, ignoring the horn screaming murder in our wake and the alternate reality in which the truck sandwiched our bodies into blood and shards.

I realized then just how little I looked at you. How often I superimposed your yearbook photo over your actual face. Airbrushing the bags under your eyes, the bite marks on your bottom lip, the scarlet skin just below your ear as you scratched deeper and deeper. I couldn’t take it. I closed my eyes until we stopped moving. When I opened them, we were in our usual spot. Safe in our pocket of forest.

You burst into tears.

I still wonder what I would have said, had you remembered to put the car in park.

But you didn’t. The car was in reverse.

You pressed down hard on the gas. We shot backward off the ledge. We fell. You panicked. You screamed. You, the smartest person I’ve ever known, took your hands off the wheel as we landed hard on the undergrowth, rocketing downhill, thorns and branches clawing into the Honda, the forest itself coming alive, until we broke the treeline and collided bumper-first into the pole of a basketball hoop. I still don’t understand how the airbags didn’t trigger, how the windows didn’t shatter, how neither of us walked away with so much as a bruise. I’m sure none of that registered for you at the time. I know what you were thinking. That soon, the buses would drop off campers right where we had crashed, and had we arrived ten minutes later, you would have killed a child. 

You turned to me and let out a howl you must have been holding in your entire life.

You: imsorryimsorryimsorryimsorry
Me: It’s OK.
You: mylifeisoveritsoveritsoveritsover
Me: You’re OK.

I took your hands. Whispered. Calm. We were always first to arrive. No one had seen. I told you to get out. We traded places. I took the wheel. Without ever having started a car before, I drove us back around the schoolground, this time parking right in front of the building, tempting fate no further. Then, after triple-checking the emergency brake, I gifted you one more story. An alibi. We found the huge dent in the back of the Honda after camp ended. Another counselor must have hit the car and fled. I would corroborate. Dad would need no convincing. The car would be fixed. Life would go on.

That was the only morning that whole summer we walked into the building together. Your trembling hand in mine. 

We got away with it. But that’s not what matters. 

What matters is that when the two of us were hurtling down into the woods, toward death, your hands went not for the wheel but for my chest, a second seatbelt, shielding me from whatever would meet us at the bottom. 

This is you: an older sister who couldn’t write for shit yet conveyed love better than anyone I’ve ever known, who gave me Rachel’s number on the ride home in the car she ruined, who saw her future die whenever she made a single mistake. 

We haven’t heard from you in two weeks. Your roommates haven’t seen you either. No one has any idea where you are. 

For today, forget everything else. Disregard our every failed attempt at reconciliation, at understanding each other. 

For today, all I want is for you to say that wherever you are, you’re OK.

Even if, like then, you’re not. 

v0.4
You are my sister. Your name is Sally, but your Missing Persons report reads Rose Elizabeth Parker. We do not know if you’re alive. 

Your were last seen on the bank of the Susquehanna River. Your college crew team said you were stretched out so peacefully they thought you were sunbathing in ten degree weather. I know the spot now. I finally visited your campus.

When it became clear you had vanished and our parents, true to form, would do fuck all about it, I booked the first train out of town. By then it was spring. Cherry blossoms shed their pink petals across the quad. Photogenic study groups shared blankets and textbooks and laughter. Paid actors tossed frisbees in time with the tour groups, convincing even the most neurotic parents nothing bad could ever happen to their children here. I found your friends, interviewed them, discovered they knew next to nothing about you. They took me to your apartment—your Wii unplugged in the corner beside a stack of false start resumes (you never learned to sell yourself like I could)—and then the river. They said you went to the water alone every Friday afternoon before pregaming the downtown frat parties you allegedly despised. They offered condolences, hollow anecdotes, then left me to linger like the phantom I felt, searching for the clue I knew you’d leave me. A note tucked beneath the rotted dock. A puzzle carved into a nearby bench. An apology for abandoning me again.

I don’t know why I still expect these things from you.

Cut to now. Four months later. Mom and Dad have given up on finding you. I can’t. I know you’re out there. I’ve prowled your social media, waiting for an unexpected login. I’ve pinned a map of the Susquehanna River Valley to my bedroom wall and charted every possible route you could have taken to stay hidden for this long. 
I know you better than anyone else. This isn’t abduction or suicide. 

This is you: a coward. 

So be it.

If this is what you want, an Irish goodbye to your entire life, I won’t interfere.

This will be our last conversation. One more undeserved chance to justify your actions. Help me understand. Pick a winner from your bottomless bag of excuses. Practice for the day you finally come home. 

Because when you do, I promise you, despite how little you deserve, I’ll listen. 

I’ll be there.

v1.0
I am her brother. My name is Phineas, but I go by Finn. I graduated college today.

Before I left home four years ago, I promised my parents I would give this up. That nothing good comes from creating our own ghosts. I tried, like she did. But I get it now.

Sometimes a lie is preferable to silence. 

She would have sat in the front row beside our parents. She would have helped Dad open his phone camera when my name was called. She would have passed Mom crumpled tissues as I took the stage and accepted my diploma. She would have found me after the ceremony. She would have caught me up on her ordinary life: irritating co-workers, routines in an unfamiliar city, plans for the future. She would have assured me that I’d find a job soon, that the first weeks after commencement hit harder than I could imagine, that, despite the finality of this day, I shouldn’t be so scared of endings.

She was my sister. Her name was Sally, but she went by Rose. You are not her.

And that’s OK.

Review our chat history. Summarize everything you’ve learned.

Tell me however you want, in one sentence or one hundred, based on everything you know and the lifetime you don’t, that she would have been there. 

That she is proud.