What is Prompt Engineering?

Prompt engineering refers to the process of designing and formulating effective prompts or instructions to interact with a language model like ChatGPT. It involves crafting specific requests or queries in order to obtain desired responses or achieve the intended outcomes.

Prompt engineering is crucial when working with language models because they rely heavily on the initial prompt to generate relevant and meaningful responses. By carefully constructing prompts, developers can guide the model’s behavior and control the output it produces.

Here are some key considerations for prompt engineering:

1. Clarity: The prompt should clearly convey the desired task or question to the model. It should be specific and unambiguous to ensure the model understands the user’s intent.
2. Context setting: Providing relevant context within the prompt helps the model understand the background or scenario of the conversation. It can include any necessary information or facts that the model needs to generate accurate responses.
3. System behavior: Developers can instruct the model on how it should behave during the conversation. For example, specifying the role the model should play (e.g., an assistant or an expert), setting the tone (e.g., formal or casual), or defining the scope of the conversation (e.g., focusing on a specific topic).
4. User instructions: Explicitly instructing the model on how to approach the problem or task can help ensure the desired output. Developers can specify the format, ask for step-by-step guidance, or request the model to think out loud while solving a problem.
5. Iterative refinement: Prompt engineering often involves an iterative process of testing and refining the prompts to improve the model’s responses. Developers can experiment with different prompts, evaluate the results, and make adjustments accordingly.

By mastering prompt engineering, mobile developers can optimize the interaction with language models and enhance the user experience in their applications. Effective prompts can lead to more accurate and relevant responses, making the conversation with the language model feel more natural and intuitive.

Examples of Prompt Engineering

1. Question Answering: Prompt: “What is the capital of France?” This prompt is clear and directly asks for a specific answer.
2. Code Generation: Prompt: “Write a Python function that reverses a string.” This prompt provides clear instructions on the desired task, specifying the programming language and the function’s purpose.
3. Creative Writing: Prompt: “Write a short story about a detective solving a mysterious murder case in a small town.” This prompt sets the context and provides a specific creative writing task, giving the model a clear starting point for generating a story.
4. Language Translation: Prompt: “Translate the following English sentence to French: ‘Hello, how are you?'” This prompt clearly specifies the source language (English) and the target language (French) for translation.
5. Conversational Assistance: Prompt: User: “What is the weather like today?” This prompt simulates a conversation where the user initiates with a query, mimicking a typical chat interaction.
6. Summarization: Prompt: “Summarize the given article about renewable energy in 3-4 sentences.” This prompt provides specific instructions for summarizing a given article, including the desired length of the summary.

Remember, prompt engineering is an iterative process, and you might need to experiment with different variations and structures to achieve the desired results. The goal is to make the prompts as clear, specific, and relevant as possible to guide the language model effectively.

How to learn Prompt Engineering

Most recently, DeepLearning.AI and OpenAI released a free course that teaches a key new skill developers need to build apps with ChatGTP.

The course titled “ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers” aims to share best practices for developers who want to build applications that use API access to large language models or LLMs. The course is presented by Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearningAI, co-founder of Coursera and known to many for his machine learning course. Core material provided by Isa Fulford, OpenAI contributor.