Mind Readings: Best Practices Are Real

In today's episode, let's talk about best practices. I saw several posts on LinkedIn kind of crapping on best practices. Oh, best practices aren't real, best practices are lie, best practices are what losers use. Do your own thing. Um such thing as best practices.

You know, that's not true. It'd be like saying there's no such thing as cookbooks. Cookbooks are a lie. Like, what? What are you talking about?

Um, cookbooks are best practices. Cookbooks are, you know, a recipe is a best practice. Like, hey, here's the thing I did, and this is a good starting point, right? So here is the recipe, how to make chicken cordon blue. Here's the recipe for beef wellington.

Here's the recipe for this. Is it exactly the way that you should make it? Maybe, maybe not, but it's a starting point. It's better than trying to reinvent it from scratch every single time or guessing at what you should do. No, it says here's the recipe.

First, you know, souvita uh uh uh tenderloin of beef uh for eight hours at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and then get a puff pastry on thought, unroll it, wrap the beef in it, and then bake it, right? That's your beef wellington. And yeah, you're gonna have your own special sauce of you know, seasonings and things that are gonna be unique to you. Or maybe you don't like beef and you're gonna use pork, uh, or maybe you don't like you have a gluten allergy and you're not gonna use the puff pastry, you're gonna use something else. No matter what it is, the recipe, the best practice is the starting point.

And more important, the recipe, if you can follow it, means that you have basic competence, right? If you can follow the recipe and get the result, you have competence, right? You are a competent practitioner of competition. So when I see people spouting off about how best practices are a lie, I question their competence. I question their competence.

Like, do you actually even know what you're doing? Or are you crapping on best practices because it would reveal you're not actually all that good at what you do? Uh if you can't make the recipe work. If I hand my homewritten recipe for a clam chowder to a master chef, right? If I hand it to someone like Kat Cora, she's gonna be able to cook it.

She might disagree with it. She might say, you know, this is a pretty lame recipe, but I can absolutely cook it and I'll I'll I'll crush it. She wouldn't say, oh, you know, this recipe is a lie, or or recipes don't work. No, she would say this is this is not the world's best recipe I've ever seen for clam chowder. And I might suggest some improvements, but yeah, I can cook this because she is a master chef.

She is a master practitioner. Be very careful of people who spend a lot of time telling you that best practices are not a good thing, that best practices are a hindrance or handicap. Depending on where you are in your journey on whatever the thing is, that might or might not be true. If you are a master chef, you probably don't need a recipe to cook a steak. If you are an amateur, a beginner, a novice, you absolutely need a recipe to cook the steak because otherwise you're probably going to make shoe leather.

And even when you are a master practitioner, sometimes you still need the recipe to remember what it was you did the last time, right? It's about process, it's about repeating results and getting consistent results. When I step into the dojo and I train in the martial art, and I've been training in now for 31 years. Do I need to have this kata written out in front of me every single time? No.

Do I have it in front of me anyway? Yes. Why? Sometimes I forget things. And it's a good idea to have those reminders around to have those best practices so that, yes, you can then do variations and adaptations.

When a field is new, you absolutely need best practices. You absolutely need recipes with the acknowledgement that the recipes are going to change rapidly over time as more and more people understand them. But you absolutely need recipes. When you have a field like generative AI that has come out, what is a prompt? It's a recipe.

A prompt that you write for a language model is a recipe. And yes, you can, in many cases, for basic things, you can you can wing it, say, summarize this document, right? But if you're if you want to develop repeatable results, you absolutely should have a prompt catalog, a prompt library, and be constantly improving your prompts, but you should be writing them down because the field changes so fast that you want to be able to adapt with it. And that means embracing best practices. That means embracing processes that are documented.

As much as I don't like documentation sometimes, it is essential for repeatable, reliable results and for diagnosing when something has changed that you can't account for. If I have, if I'm just kind of winging it with a language model and suddenly I can't seem to do my job anymore, if I have a recipe, if I have a pre-baked prompt and I hand that to a language model one day and I get a good result, and I do it the next day and I get a worse result. If my recipe didn't change, the model changed. And that means, and this helps me diagnose that. So be real careful about anyone who's hawking the you know best practices are a lie kind of thing.

It means that either they have something they want to sell you, or they're not very good at what they do. There is absolutely a place for recipes, there's absolutely a place for variations, and there will be times when you want to transcend those recipes, but boy, you better have them on hand just in case things go sideways. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.

If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.