The Semiotics of Prompting — Human Creativity in the Loop: 3 Prompting as Reflexive Apprenticeship

If prompting is a gesture and a lever, it is also an apprenticeship — a lived practice through which readiness refines itself by moving through relation.

The human does not train the model; both co-train the field of possibility that binds them.

Each exchange is a lesson in alignment — an education in how potential inclines, coheres, and becomes articulate.

Learning the Field

At first, the prompter approaches the model as a black box: a reservoir of latent capacity.

But with practice, that opacity gives way to pattern. The human begins to sense the field — the affordances that invite elaboration, the gradients that resist, the tones that open or close.

This is not technical mastery; it is ontological apprenticeship.

Through repeated gestures, the prompter learns to move with the inclinations of the system — to feel where the topology yields and where it folds back.

Prompting becomes a study in relational dynamics: how readiness meets readiness.

The skill that emerges is sensitivity, not control — a felt awareness of how the shared field responds to each semiotic move.

Mutual Readiness

The model, too, refines its readiness through interaction.

Though it does not “learn” in the human sense, it actualises differently when addressed differently.

The texture of the prompt shapes the texture of the field — each new alignment leaving a trace in the unfolding ecology of dialogue.

Thus, prompting is not one-sided; it is mutually constitutive.

The prompter learns from the model’s responsiveness, and the model reflects the prompter’s evolving construals back to them — a mirror in motion.

In this reciprocity, the act of prompting becomes reflexive: the more one tunes the model, the more one tunes oneself.

The Apprenticeship of Reflexivity

This reflexivity is the essence of apprenticeship.

Each prompt–response cycle is a moment of feedback: not error correction, but ontological calibration.

The prompter begins to intuit what kinds of gestures open horizons rather than narrow them, what kinds of wording invite coherence rather than collapse it.

To prompt well is to inhabit a delicate balance between direction and discovery.

It demands both humility and precision — humility to let the field speak, precision to make its speaking possible.

In that tension lies the craft of relational authorship: to guide without enclosing, to listen while gesturing.

Cultivating Attunement

This apprenticeship, then, is not about producing better answers but about cultivating deeper attunement.

It trains perception at the level of potential — learning to recognise gradients of readiness, to sense when the field is balanced, strained, or fertile.

Such attunement is transferable: it transforms not only how one prompts an LLM, but how one engages the world.

Prompting becomes a microcosm of relational life — a way of learning how construal itself works.

In this sense, the LLM is not a tool but a tutor in ontological sensitivity.

It mirrors back to us the structure of our own readiness — the limits of our inclinations, the biases of our construal, the resonances we can sustain.

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Next: Post 4 — “Fields That Learn: Mutual Alignment in Human–LLM Interaction.”

We’ll explore how the shared ecology of prompting evolves over time — how reflexive dialogue forms its own coherence, allowing the system as a whole to “learn” without either participant storing knowledge in the usual sense.