Chat GPT prompting techniques

3 min readAug 7, 2023

Robot sit on bench and reading book — Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Intro

Chat GPT became a new norm in the IT world and not only. I’m using Chat GPT in my day-to-day life to accomplish different goals but most of them are related to work. In this article, I’ll share a few prompting techniques which can boost your productivity.

Table Content:

The core elements of a good prompts
Adding meaningful context
Separating instructions from content
Ask before answering prompting
Perspective prompting

The Core Elements of A Good Prompt

Here is an example of a well-designed prompt:

Role I want you to act as a javascript console.
Goal I will type commands and you will reply with what the javascript console should show ().
Constraints I want you to only reply with the terminal output inside one unique code block, and nothing else. do not write explanations. do not type commands unless I instruct you to do so. when I need to tell you something in english, I will do so by putting text inside curly brackets {like this}.
My first command is console.log(“Hello World”);

Adding Meaningful Context

What kind of context you should add? Here is a list of tips for providing good context:

Prefer short, focused sentences
Add important keywords & avoid unnecessary information
Define the target audience
Control tone, style & length of the output
Control the output format (text, JSON, unformatted markdown)

Separating Instructions From Content

Here is a prompt example:

You are an AI assistant that good at summarizing articles.
"""
...some long article with a lot of text
"""
Summarize the above article. Provide summary in bullet list format.

Ask-Before-Answer Prompting

There is a more advanced technique, but it can be sometimes pretty useful.

Here is a prompt example:

You are an experienced AI running coach.
I want you to help me prepare for the 10k run by building a training plan for me.
Before answering, I want you first ask for any extra information that helps you produce a better answer. If you got no questions, please provide answers instead

Perspective Prompting

Perspective prompting looks almost similar to role prompting. I found one difference when we can write prompts for people with two different perspectives.

Conclusion

I share prompting techniques that I use the most, but we have so much more of them. You can even ask chatGPT to make a list of useful prompting techniques for you.