Guidelines for how to prompt efficiently

Prompts are input to AI tools. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you need to adjust your prompts for the scenario you’re solving for. Therefore, how you “prompt” matters. For example, if your prompt is too vague, you won’t get what you need. Or, let’s say you’re trying to use a prompt to generate company slogans; you don’t want to use the same prompt for generating code for an app. Conversely, in a discipline like data science, it’s important you perform tasks in a certain order and your prompt should reflect what you want done and, if needed, the steps to do so.

What you need to succeed is an approach, a strategy, that you can use in general to be efficient with AI assistants. Additionally, such a strategy should be specific enough to present “best practices” for chosen problem domains. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, we’ve developed a prompt...