The Prompt Report: Prompt Engineering Techniques
Don’t worry I’m not going to give you a list of the top 50 prompts to try, anyways that just doesn’t work at scale. This blog is not about the top 50 or 100 fancy prompts, but more about different types of prompting techniques. You would be surprised to know that there are more than 50 different types of prompting techniques. It won’t be possible to go through all 50, but we will have an overview of 6 main categories of prompting.
Let me clearly state that I’m not a fan of prompt engineering and have widely criticized it in the past. I like systems with definite answers and controllability.
Despite my distaste towards prompt engineering, I can’t deny all the past work done in prompt engineering. There is no one-shoe-fit type of prompt technique, but people have shown time and time again better performance on specific datasets with specific prompting techniques. Knowing that with certain prompting techniques, we can get better responses from our language models, we should definitely try to understand the entire landscape of prompting and use proper prompting techniques for our use case.
Introduction
As Karpathy puts it, English is the new language of programming. The widespread reach of LLMs has made it much easier for non-programmers to build small demos and beginners to get…
