Perfecting prompt engineering

If you’ve been around GenAI at all in the last year, you will have heard about prompt engineering—with both good and bad connotations. Simply put, prompt engineering is learning how to most effectively ask a question for a GenAI system to get the most accurate and detailed answer. Here are a few things to consider when writing a prompt.

Be concise: Though a prompt might get long to cover a lot of needed details, it still needs to be to the point. The more words you use, the more chances there are for the GenAI system to misinterpret your words. Here’s a prompt used during research for the top GenAI tools:

What are the top 10 GenAI web products based on monthly visits?

Be detailed: Discuss your needs as though talking to a young and inexperienced child. Make sure your prompt states the exact expectations for the output, where that makes sense. Here’s the prompt I used to generate the image found in Figure 14.3 earlier...