Prompting fundamentals

A prompt is a specification

Vague prompts produce vague output. State what the task is, what the output should look like, and what the model must not do. Most disappointing results are underspecified requests rather than model limitations.

When a rule is hard to describe, show it. Two or three examples of an edge case handled correctly communicate more than a paragraph of instruction.

Iterate against a fixed set of inputs. Changing the prompt and the test case at the same time means you learn nothing from the result.