This episode traces how prompt engineering evolved from informal tricks (tipping, role-playing, "take a deep breath") into three structured reasoning frameworks — Chain of Thought, Self-Consistency, and Tree of Thoughts — that dramatically improved LLM performance without changing the models themselves, culminating in the insight that intelligence in these systems is a latent resource unlocked by better scaffolding, not better weights.

Credits

Cover Art by Brianna Williams

TMOM Intro Music by Danny Meza

A special thank you to these talented artists for their contributions to the show.

Links and Reference

• Chain of Thought Prompting: Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., et al. (2022). "Chain-of-Thought Prompting ElicitsReasoning in Large Language Models." NeurIPS 2022. arXiv: 2201.11903

• Self-Consistency: Wang, X., Wei, J., Schuurmans, D., et al. (2022). "Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models." ICLR 2023. arXiv: 2203.11171

• Tree of Thoughts: Yao, S., Yu, D., Zhao, J., et al. (2023). "Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models." NeurIPS 2023. arXiv: 2305.10601

• "Take a deep breath and think carefully" improves performance:: Yang, C., Wang, X., Lu, Y., et al. (2023). "Large Language Models as Optimizers." arXiv:2309.03409.

• Christmas / holiday performance degradation caveat: This claim was popularized on social media and discussed on platforms like X/Twitter and Hacker News in late 2023. A blog post by Rob Lynch (December 2023) ran some informal tests. No peer-reviewed

• study has definitively confirmed this effect. Consider adding a caveat.

• Cleverbot:: Cleverbot (1997–2023). Originally created by Rollo Carpenter. Website: cleverbot.com (now defunct).

• OpenClaw acquisition by OpenAI: TechCrunch (Feb 15, 2026): "OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI."

• NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative: NIST (Feb 17, 2026): "Announcing the AI Agent Standards Initiative for Interoperable and Secure Innovation." https://www.nist.gov/caisi/ai-agent-standards-initiative

• OpenAI o1 as the first "thinking model": "Learning to Reason with LLMs" — announcement of o1 model family.

• Kimi K 2.5 as an agentic coding model: Moonshot AI (2025/2026). Kimi K 2.5 — a model optimized for agentic coding tasks. Release details from Moonshot AI's official announcements.

• Claude sub-agents / Cowork launch:: Anthropic (Feb 2026): Claude Cowork launch. Also: Claude Code sub-agent capabilities announced alongside Opus 4.6.

Abandoned Episode Titles

"My Grandmother Used to Read Me Windows Keys as Bedtime Stories"

"Take a Deep Breath, You're a Spreadsheet"

"Inception, but It's Math Homework"