Prompting Tips

Prompts are the instructions given to AI models. Output quality depends on how well they are written for each model.

Top 05 tips

1. Be specific and clear: Provide clear, explicit instructions with all the necessary details.

2. Provide context: Include any necessary background information for your question. AI models typically have broad knowledge so any specifics should be provided in the context.

3. Describe persona: Instruct AI to pretend to be a character or role, or take on a persona. This is useful shorthand to guide the model. Example: “You are a product manager”.

4. Set format expectations: Define the desired output structure (e.g., bullet points, markdown, JSON). Be aware that asking for too much structure has been shown to reduce reasoning ability.

Tip: Add “Use well-structured markdown” to your prompt to add headings, bullets, and more.

1. Use examples for clarity: Include a few examples in your instructions like pairs of representative inputs and outputs. This will help guide the model towards the type of answer you expect. Prompt engineers call this “few-shot prompting” — prompting without examples is called “one-shot prompting”.

General tip: Think of AI as a very capable intern.

Effective prompting will involve a combination of these strategies to get the most relevant and high-quality responses.

Resources

• OpenAI prompting guide

• Anthropic prompting guide