Prompt Engineering for LLMs

Preface

Since OpenAI introduced GPT-2 in early 2019, large language models (LLMs) have rapidly changed our world. In 2019, if you, as a coder, had a technical question, then you would search the internet for an answer. More often than not, there would be no answer, leaving only the option to post on some question-and-answer (Q&A) forum in the possibly vain hope that someone might answer you. But today, instead of breaking your flow, you just ask an LLM assistant for direct commentary on the code you’re working on. Moreover, you can even engage in a pairing session where the assistant writes the code to your specifications. This is just in the field of software engineering, and similar tectonic shifts are beginning to be felt in almost any field that you can name.

The reason that this revolution is taking place is because the LLM is truly a revolutionary technology that makes it possible to achieve in software what formerly could be done only through human interaction. LLMs can generate content, answer questions, extract tabular data from natural language text, summarize text, classify documents, translate, and (in principle) do just about anything that you can do with text—except that LLMs will do it many orders of magnitude faster and never stop for a break.

For entrepreneurs, this opens endless doors of opportunity in every field imaginable. But before you can take advantage of these opportunities, you have to be prepared. This book serves as a guide to help you understand LLMs, ...