OpenAI Offiacial Documentation

<aside> 🔗 https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering

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1. Write clear instructions

• Include details in your query to get more relevant answers

  

• Ask the model to adopt a persona

  

• Use delimiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input

  

• Specify the steps required to complete a task

  

• Provide examples ("few-shot" prompting)

  

• Specify the desired length of the output

2. Provide reference text

• Instruct the model to answer using a reference text

  

3. Split complex tasks into simpler subtasks

• Use intent classification to identify the most relevant instructions for a user query

  

• For dialogue applications that require very long conversations, summarize or filter previous dialogue

• Summarize long documents piecewise and construct a full summary recursively

4. Give the model time to “think”

• Instruct the model to work out its own solution before rushing to a conclusion (CoT)

  

• Use inner monologue or a sequence of queries to hide the model's reasoning process

  • Inner monologue is a tactic that can be used to mitigate this. The idea of inner monologue is to instruct the model to put parts of the output that are meant to be hidden from the user into a structured format that makes parsing them easy. Then before presenting the output to the user, the output is parsed and only part of the output is made visible.