7 Prompt engineering: Strategies for guiding and evaluating LLMs
This chapter covers
- Prompt engineering and its role in generative AI
- Crafting effective prompts to guide model behavior
- Assessing the quality and reliability of AI outputs
- Comparing prompt engineering to post-training
When ChatGPT became widely available to the public in late 2022, millions of people began experimenting—not just with what these AI systems could do, but with how to ask them questions effectively. It quickly became clear that even small changes in wording could significantly shape a model’s response. A prompt like “summarize the moon landing” might return a straightforward paragraph. But add “in the voice of a noir detective,” and it becomes a gritty tale of a spacecraft called the Eagle, landing in a world of shadows and suspicion.