Don’t ask for lists of 10, ask for 40

I enjoyed Simon Willison’s appearance on the Changelog podcast to talk about LLMs. One of the best things I took away from it was when you ask ChatGPT/Claude/etc for a list of ideas, don’t just ask for 10 (which I often do). Instead, ask for 40 because the length of the list causes it to have to come up with more creative variations. This seems to check out in actual practice.