Prompt Engineering for LLMs

Chapter 1. Introduction to Prompt Engineering

ChatGPT was released in late November of 2022. By January of the following year, the application had accumulated an estimated 100 million monthly users, making ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer application ever. (In comparison, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users, and Instagram took 2.5 years.) And as you can surely attest, esteemed reader, this public acclaim is well deserved! LLMs—like the one that backs ChatGPT—are revolutionizing the way we work. Rather than running to Google to find answers via a traditional web search, you can easily just ask an LLM to talk about a topic. Rather than reading Stack Overflow or rummaging through blog posts to answer technical questions, you can ask an LLM to write you a personalized tutorial on your exact problem space and then follow it up with a set of questions and answers (a Q&A) about the topic. Rather than following the traditional steps to build a programming library, you can boost your progress by pairing with an LLM-based assistant to build the scaffolding and autocomplete your code as you write it!

And to you, future reader, will you use LLMs in ways that we, your humble authors from the year 2024, cannot fathom? If the current trends continue, you’ll likely have conversations with LLMs many times during the course of a typical day—in the voice of the IT support assistant when your cable goes out, in a friendly conversation with the corner ATM, and, yes, even with a frustratingly ...