7-part series

Prompt Engineering, Properly

A sequenced, beginner-to-advanced guide to the prompt engineering techniques that actually move accuracy, from LLM settings to advanced reasoning methods.

The Settings That Change Your OutputTemperature, top_p, max tokens, stop sequences, and the penalties, and when to touch eachJune 29, 20266 minJune 29, 20266 min
The Anatomy of a Good PromptInstruction, context, input, and output indicator, plus the design habits that make them workJune 29, 20267 minJune 29, 20267 min
Zero-Shot vs Few-Shot PromptingWhen examples help, how many to use, how to pick them, and where few-shot quietly breaks downJune 29, 20267 minJune 29, 20267 min
Chain-of-Thought PromptingStandard and zero-shot CoT, when step-by-step reasoning actually helps, and what it costsJune 29, 20267 minJune 29, 20267 min
Self-Consistency: Sampling Your Way to Better AnswersRun the same reasoning prompt several times, then take the majority answerJune 29, 20265 minJune 29, 20265 min
Generated-Knowledge Prompting: Surface Facts Before You AnswerHave the model write down what it knows first, then answer using that as contextJune 29, 20266 minJune 29, 20266 min
Prompting Reasoning Models Is Almost the Opposite of Prompting Chat ModelsWhy the step-by-step prompts you learned in this series can hurt an o3 or Claude with thinking onJuly 1, 20267 minJuly 1, 20267 min