Prompt Engineering Basics & Custom Instructions

Prompt Engineering

The skill of crafting clear text inputs (prompts) to guide GenAI models such as LLMs
toward specific outputs.

Zero Shot Prompting

Relies entirely on the model’s pre-trained knowledge to interpret and respond.

It works well for straightforward tasks where the model can reasonably infer the requirements without additional context.

Few Shot Prompting

• Help establish a pattern, guiding the model to interpret the task requirements with more precision.

• Effective when the desired output format needs to be demonstrated.

Role Playing

Assigning the AI a specific role or persona enabling it to engage with tasks in
a realistic and contextually appropriate manner.

Chain Of Thought Prompting

• This technique is designed to guide an LLM through a
  multi-step reasoning process.

• Useful for tasks that require logical inference,
  detailed reasoning, or decision based on multiple
  variables.

Guided Zero Shot COT Prompting

• Prompting the model with a structured sequence of steps without specific examples.

• This technique is useful for tasks that require a precise sequence but may not need specific examples to explain the pattern.

Open Ended Zero Shot COT Prompting

This technique uses minimal instruction to prompt the model to think through the problem independently, without any structured steps or examples.

Few Shot COT Prompting

A technique where you provide a small number of example problems, each with step‑by‑step reasoning, to guide an LLM to produce its own multi‑step reasoning on new queries

What to include for custom instructions

• Who you are

• What good looks like

• How you want it to push back