Some time a go a colleague commenting on the idea of iterative prompting, suggested to ask GPT to “think about something” and then make a decision on what to write or not to write.
The problem with this approach is that a session with an LLM doesn’t really have a memory outside the actual text being created by the chat, consequently it cannot “keep something in mind” while completing other tasks.
But it can pretend it does.
To test this, you can ask to a LLM to “think of a number, but don’t tell me”. At the time of this writing most models will respond by confirming that they have thought of a number. Of course they haven’t... but because they are trained to mimic human interactions, they are pretending they are.
This is something to always keep in mind while prompting.
For example, it is not effective to prompt a system to “make a list and only show me the part matching a criteria”, but you can request to print the full output and then generate a final list (“print the list, then update it with the criteria”).