Providing examples in your prompt is a technique known as few-shot prompting . Examples can be a great way to quickly communicate what your desired response should look like - it can often be easier to show with a few examples rather than trying to describe it with words. 'Shots'  is a term taken from the field of machine learning. Each shot is an example given to the model before it performs the task. We often refer to 'few-shot'  and 'zero-shot'  prompting (where you don't

"You're an expert X." "Act as a Y" Role prompting is one of the most widely repeated tips in AI circles. The underlying idea is that if you assign the model a job title or area of expertise, it will respond more like a person who holds that role, making it more relevant, more precise, more expert-sounding. The research on whether that actually holds up is more nuanced than the advice suggests. And the nuance is important if you want to try this out yourself. What is role prom

There's a weird phenomenon with the way AI reads documents and conversations, and it negatively impacts the accuracy of the responses we get back. AI's accuracy when recalling information located in the middle of the context window is lower than if the same information were located at the start or the end . It's known as the 'Lost in the Middle' effect , and it's a problem that researchers have studied in some depth. The consequences of this are pretty simple to understand an

Learn what a context window is, how tokens work, and why they affect your everyday AI use - explained in plain English.

Modern AI chat tools are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), which are sophisticated systems trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like responses. LLMs like Claude and Gemini don't truly "understand" in the human sense, but they excel at recognizing patterns in language and predicting what text should come next based on your input. This is why the quality of your prompt matters so much. The AI model can only work with what you give it, m

And What Happened to CoT Prompting? Prefer to listen to this article instead? I used ElevenLabs TTS  to create this narration. Check them out using my affiliate link, here . "Think step by step" ...was once great prompt engineering advice, but now seems to have little to no effect. In fact, what if I told you that this technique, at best, has little effect on output quality, and at worst, increases costs, latency, and may even reduce the accuracy of your response? It decreas

Learn to build AI-powered apps using LLM APIs. This beginner’s guide covers prompt engineering, function calling, and creating custom AI tools.

Master advanced prompt engineering techniques like Chain-of-Thought, ReAct, and role-based prompting strategies to get smarter LLM responses