Absurd Precision: A Prompt Engineer’s Spiral

Ever have one of those days where the smallest task feels impossibly over-engineered? You write twelve sticky notes just to remind yourself to send one email.

ChatGPT has those days a lot.

That’s because prompting can easily veer into meta-absurdity — spelling out what not to do, adding guardrails no one asked for, and drafting entire treatises just to roll a marshmallow across a plate.

This video is a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of that spiral.

The Gemini Prompt

Here’s the exact copy/paste Gemini prompt I used to conjure it:

🎬 Gemini Prompt: “Absurd Precision — A Prompt Engineer’s Spiral”
Begin with a fixed overhead shot of a single marshmallow resting on a ceramic plate.

The plate is centered on a matte black table. No gloss. No shine. No reflections.

The marshmallow is standard size.
Not jumbo.
Not artisanal.
No visible branding. No anthropomorphic features.
It is starkly, disappointingly average.

The camera remains completely still.
No zooms, no pans, no cuts.

Lighting is soft and even — this is not an audition tape for Great British Bake Off.
No spotlighting. No chiaroscuro. No sense of destiny.

After two full seconds of stillness, the marshmallow gently rolls left.
Let’s be explicit here:
It rolls once.
It rolls left.
It does not bounce.
It does not roll right, loop, vibrate, teleport, or perform parkour.
It does not transform into a rabbit, toaster, emoji, or TikTok trend.
There are no hands.
There are no pets.
There is no wind.

The camera must not:
— Cut to a child eating spaghetti
— Pull back to reveal an existential metaphor
— Play music of any kind

There is no narration.
There is no lesson.
There is no swelling orchestra.

The marshmallow rolls.
It stops.
That’s it.

No fade to black.
No credits.
No waterfalls.
No quotes about resilience.
No bloopers.

🎨 Visual style: Bleakly functional. Like a training video for a discontinued appliance.
This is not a Sundance submission. It is an act of survival.

🧱 Guardrails (do not remove):
— No narrative arcs
— No sentient objects
— No background dancers
— No sound design that implies emotion
— No character development

🕗 Total runtime: 8 seconds.
Any additional content is a hallucination.

Thanks for reading. I’m Kiki Beach — a recruiter who’s now also helping teams and individuals use AI to work smarter. Through AiTricity.ai, I share practical tools, prompts, and behind-the-scenes workflows that boost clarity, speed, and results — sometimes with videos to match.

Follow for more: Medium · Instagram · YouTube · X

Bonus Prompt

Prompt: Write me the most over-engineered set of instructions for the simplest action you can imagine — like pushing a single button or moving a paperclip — while enforcing unnecessary guardrails.

Why it works: Sometimes AI prompt engineering isn’t about efficiency at all — it’s about testing the edges of absurdity to see what still holds together.