Prompting beginner

Prompt Engineering

Designing and iterating on prompts to get reliable output — closer to spec-writing than to magic words.

Prompt engineering is the practice of stating the task, audience, format, and constraints precisely enough that a model can succeed. The reliable levers are specificity, examples, explicit output format, and giving the model the context it lacks. Most ’the model can’t do this’ problems turn out to be underspecified prompts.

In practice: Adding two example outputs cuts format errors more than any adjective ever will.

Where this comes up