Prompting Techniques
Overview
Prompt Engineering helps to effectively design and improve prompts to get better results on different tasks with LLMs.
While the previous basic examples were fun, in this section we cover more advanced prompting engineering techniques that allow us to achieve more complex tasks and improve reliability and performance of LLMs.
Available Techniques
Basic Techniques
- Zero-shot Prompting - Prompting without examples
- Few-shot Prompting - Learning from examples
Advanced Reasoning
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting - Multi-step reasoning
- Meta Prompting - Structure-oriented prompting
- Self-Consistency - Multiple reasoning paths
Knowledge and Generation
- Generate Knowledge Prompting - Creating context
- Prompt Chaining - Multi-stage processing
- Tree of Thoughts - Systematic exploration
Tool Integration and Automation
- Retrieval Augmented Generation - External knowledge
- Automatic Reasoning and Tool-use - Tool integration
- Automatic Prompt Engineer - Automated optimization
Specialized Approaches
- Active-Prompt - Adaptive exemplar selection
- Directional Stimulus Prompting - Guided generation
- Program-Aided Language Models - Code execution
- ReAct - Reasoning and acting
- Reflexion - Self-improvement through reflection
Multimodal and Specialized
- Multimodal CoT - Text and vision reasoning
- Graph Prompting - Graph-structured data
Key Benefits
- Improved Performance: Better results on complex tasks
- Enhanced Reliability: More consistent and accurate outputs
- Task-Specific Optimization: Tailored approaches for different use cases
- Scalable Solutions: Techniques that work across various domains
Getting Started
Choose a technique based on your specific needs:
- For simple tasks: Start with Zero-shot or Few-shot prompting
- For reasoning tasks: Use Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts
- For complex workflows: Implement Prompt Chaining
- For tool integration: Explore ReAct or ART
- For optimization: Try Active-Prompt or APE
Related Topics
- Prompt Engineering Guide - General prompt engineering techniques
- Applications - Real-world use cases
- Best Practices - Implementation guidelines