expectedwrong hindsight

NASA Wrote a Megaprompt and It Slaps

The biomimicry researchers at NASA PETAL made a system prompt that does more useful work than most AI products shipping right now.

2 min read 274 words #prompt-engineering #AI #biomimicry #NASA #GPT
hindsight — evolved

The megaprompt approach — elaborate system instructions with detailed role definitions — peaked and then receded. Models got good enough that NASA-grade prompt engineering became less necessary. The craft is still real, but the ceiling dropped. A well-designed system prompt matters less when the model already knows what biomimicry is.

The people who landed a rover on Mars have entered the prompt engineering discourse, and they are not fooling around.

NASA PETAL — their biomimicry research group — built a Discord bot called BIDARA, a Biologically Inspired Design and Research Assistant. The bot helps engineers and designers do the thing biomimicry people do, which is look at how a cuttlefish manages buoyancy and ask whether a submarine should be doing that. The interesting part isn't the bot. The interesting part is that they published the system prompt, and it's very, very good.

It's long. It's structured. It reads like someone sat down and actually thought hard about what an expert in this domain knows and does, then wrote that down as instructions — as opposed to the usual approach, which is vibes and hoping.

Most system prompts in the wild are "you are a helpful assistant who is friendly and professional." NASA wrote a document. A dense, careful document that treats the model like a junior researcher who needs to understand the methodology before they're allowed to answer anything.

The result, apparently, is a chatbot that actually reasons through biological analogues instead of just doing a word association between "fast" and "cheetah."

The lesson here is either that prompt engineering is a real skill with real craft behind it, or that the bar is so low that any organization willing to write two paragraphs can clear it. Maybe both. NASA is the existence proof either way — the megaprompt is sitting right there on GitHub, free to copy into your own ChatGPT session, which is the most 2023 sentence I have written all month.