“if you keep going on trial and error I think that's when you get to these incantations because uh you I maybe I think after you've been working on that problem for too long and you seen too many versions of the same thing you start to get weird and uh you know that's when you start casting spells”

Trial-and-error past the working point turns into casting spells

There's a window where iterating on a prompt is productive — after that, it turns into superstition. Tweaking the same prompt for hours produces longer, weirder text that feels powerful but is just correlation mistaken for causation. Get to 'working okay' fast, then switch out of trial-and-error into systematic A/B testing across 100 runs per variant.