Prompt Engineering
The practice of designing and optimising prompts to get better results from AI models. Combines art and science.
In-Depth Explanation
Prompt engineering is the discipline of crafting effective prompts to elicit desired behaviors and outputs from AI models. It's become a crucial skill as LLMs are applied to diverse business tasks.
Core prompt engineering techniques:
- Clear instructions: Explicit, unambiguous directions
- Role assignment: "You are an expert in..."
- Format specification: Define expected output structure
- Few-shot examples: Demonstrate desired behavior
- Chain-of-thought: Request step-by-step reasoning
- Constraints: Set boundaries and limitations
Advanced techniques:
- Self-consistency: Generate multiple responses, pick the best
- Tree of thoughts: Explore multiple reasoning paths
- Retrieval augmentation: Add relevant context dynamically
- Constitutional AI: Include principles to guide behavior
- Meta-prompting: Prompts that generate prompts
Prompt engineering process:
- Define the task clearly
- Write initial prompt
- Test with varied inputs
- Identify failure modes
- Refine and iterate
- Validate on edge cases
- Document and version
Business Context
Prompt engineering can improve AI output quality by 2-5x without any code changes or model training.
How Clever Ops Uses This
We bring systematic prompt engineering expertise to Australian businesses, developing robust prompts that deliver consistent results across production workloads.
Example Use Case
"Testing different prompt structures to find the one that produces the best customer responses - systematic iteration reveals what works."