Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is just being really specific with your AI. The best prompts have five ingredients: role, context, examples, constraints, and format.

The RCECF recipe

Role

You are a ___.Telling the AI who to be changes how it talks. “You are a friendly museum guide” vs. “You are a strict copy-editor” — same question, very different answers.

Context

Who is the output for? What’s the situation? “I’m presenting to a room of 7th graders who are new to this topic.”

Examples (“few-shot”)

Show one or two examples of good output. This is the single biggest upgrade you can make to a prompt.

Constraints

“Under 200 words.” “Don’t use the word ‘delve.’” “Only include facts from the article I pasted.”

Format

“Bullet points.” “A table with three columns.” “Respond in JSON.”

Advanced move: chain-of-thought

Add “Think step by step before answering” to any complex prompt. The AI will write out its reasoning, and because each step is written first, the final answer is more likely to be correct.

Try it now

In your own AI tool, run one weak prompt (“write me a poem”) and one strong one using all five ingredients. Notice how much more the strong prompt controls the answer.