What I was thinking of here - if you remember the statue near the mountain, and it reaches out. There's also other statues in the area. But somewhere around that area, there are also trees. And if you look at the trees from the right place... the statues, the trees, they're doing the same thing. Why are trees doing the same thing?! Pondering that led in interesting directions.
The Witness was so multilayered, in ways that unexpectedly rewired my mind. My suggestion is that the rewiring that can occur from The Witness, is also a useful mental shift when interacting with AI. I think many of the people I see going fastest and most fluidly with AI have had that mental shift.
On a different note, where I can be more direct. Prompting is not just "the prompt". The entire environment is the prompt. Everything about the folder the AI finds itself in, adjacent files it's allowed to look at, everything it sees and encounters as it progresses, they each steer the model slightly. So where there used to be "prompt engineering" and "context engineering", there's also "environment engineering". The environment is the context.
And that perspective may bring you back to The Witness again.
I'm gonna be real with you, my dude, this 100% sounds like you wanting to feel clever and superior rather than actually being that way.
I, too, love me some hard puzzle games. Baba Is You does some wild things with the mechanics that make you feel super clever when you figure it out. However, games are deliberately designed to give you those moments. That's why they're fun. They're an experience.
Waving your hands around vaguely and going "you must experience the maaaaaaaagic of aaaaaiiiiiiiiii" does not make you sound like a great and powerful wizard with secret knowledge, it kinda just makes you sound like that kid who took yugioh way too seriously and believed in the heart of the cards.
I don't get FOMO when I hear people talk about their super secret prompting techniques, because if it was actually smart, they'd want me to know lol. So far I'm batting 1.000 on that conjecture.
On The Witness though, if you think it's a puzzle game, we didn't experience it the same way. Maybe I should just leave that one there.
I agree, this was terribly unhelpful for someone struggling with AI. My prompting is no different to Boris Cherny's advice a couple of days ago on X: "Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker. There's no secret to prompting." I remain confused at why some people think AI doesn't work, but I guess I'm not helping them solve it.