The Complete Obsolete Guide to Generative AI

6 Prompt engineering: Optimizing your experience

This chapter covers

• The definition of prompt engineering
• Prompt engineering best practices
• Zero-shot and few-shot prompting
• Prompting LLMs for historical time-series datasets

I’ll bet that before actually opening this book, many—perhaps most—of you expected prompt engineering to be a primary focus. And yet, here we are in chapter 6 (halfway through the book!), and we’re only just hitting the topic. What’s the story here?

In my defense, I’d say that it’s partly about what we mean when we use the term. For some, prompt engineering covers a lot of what you’ll figure out on your own by just having fun experimenting with ChatGPT or MidJourney. It matters, but it doesn’t require a whole book.

But I’d ...