--- title: "Ambitious Prompting: What's Bigger than a Factory?" type: post url: "https://robotpaper.ai/ambitious-prompting-whats-bigger-than-a-factory/" canonical: "https://robotpaper.ai/ambitious-prompting-whats-bigger-than-a-factory/" markdown_url: "https://robotpaper.ai/ambitious-prompting-whats-bigger-than-a-factory.md" published: "2026-11-09T20:56:37.000+00:00" updated: "2026-11-09T20:56:37.000+00:00" tags: ["Pattern"] author: "Roy Osherove" author_links: ["https://robotpaper.ai", "https://x.com/royosherove", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/", "https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7", "https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md"] description: "This sentence in the hacker news thread on Fable 5.2 really resonated with me: \"Fable is good, but you really have to push the ambition of your prompt in order to see proper separation from Opus 5.5.\" Thinking Bigger when prompting, realizing that you've been prompting \"in a box\" all this time, is a recurring a-ha moment that I'd bet not enough engineers are experience - and they should be. * \"Fix the bug\" – Think Bigger--> * \"How can we prevent such bugs in the future?\" – Bigger --> * \"Im" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Ambitious Prompting: What's Bigger than a Factory? This sentence in the [hacker news thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429906) on Fable 5.2 really resonated with me: > "Fable is good, but you really have to push the ambition of your prompt in order to see proper separation from Opus 5.5." Thinking Bigger when prompting, realizing that you've been prompting "in a box" all this time, is a recurring a-ha moment that I'd bet not enough engineers are experience - and they should be. - "Fix the bug" – Think Bigger--> - "How can we prevent such bugs in the future?" – Bigger --> - "Implement a testing/ verification system that finds these kinds of bugs and runs on every commit or in CI-CD" – Bigger ? --> - "Design a system that avoids needing to create these kinds of bugs in the first place - is that possible? brainstorm with me" I bet there's an even bigger idea here that I can't wrap my head around. Or: - Build me a web app --> Bigger --> - Build and deploy me a web app that support both mobile, desktop and web with database, auth... –Bigger--> - Set up a factory that builds me web apps of this type , and sets up all the hosting, infrastructure and monitoring so that I can try out ideas really quickly --Bigger?? --> - Set up a learning factory that not only builds it, but measures the success of the idea, brings in users, and lets me know how it's going – Bigger??? --> - Set up an experimentation factory not only only monitors and learns, but also dreams up new creative ideas based on what I like, deploys them, tries them, iterates, destroys, creates, rinse repeat I bet there's a bigger idea there as well. Or - Build me a game – Bigger--> - Sell my game – Bigger --> - Turn my game into a physical game with 3d printing, outside factory It really feels like we are starting to be limited by our imagination (and tokens!) ## Read next - [AJX 1.0 - Agentic Journey Experience (Skill + CLI)](https://robotpaper.ai/ajx-1-0-agentic-journey-experience-skill-cli.md) - [Anatomy of a Personal Factory of Grok Bots](https://robotpaper.ai/anatomy-of-a-personal-factory-of-grok-bots.md) - [Pattern: Progressive Determinism for AI Tasks](https://robotpaper.ai/pattern-progressive-determinism-for-ai-tasks.md) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove** - Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: [https://x.com/royosherove](https://x.com/royosherove) - LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/) ### Contact - Contact form: [https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7](https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7) ### License Content on robotpaper.ai is licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post). More about Roy and his other sites and projects: [https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md](https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md)