TIL three main prompt engineering techniques help improve LLM responses:

  1. Zero-shot prompting: Give clear instructions without examples. Best for simple tasks like summarization, translation, and creative writing. Specify the goal, context, audience, and constraints.
  2. Few-shot prompting: Provide 2–5 input-output examples to demonstrate the desired pattern. Best for classification, specific output formats, and handling edge cases. Examples should be consistent and representative.
  3. Chain-of-thought prompting: Break complex problems into logical steps to improve reasoning and accuracy. Best for mathematics, debugging, decision-making, and multi-step analysis.