Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering, though new, follows a long history of making complex systems more accessible. In the 1960s, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was developed to enable non-technical business professionals to program computers for data-heavy tasks like finance and accounting. It abstracted low-level coding into simple, readable commands, allowing broader interaction with machines.
Today, prompt engineering serves a similar purpose for AI models. It abstracts the complexities of large language models (LLMs), letting users, even without technical expertise, instruct models in tasks like summarization or reasoning. Like COBOL simplified early computing, prompt engineering transforms task specification into natural language instructions, bridging the gap between human intention and machine output.
In this chapter, we’ll explore:
- What is prompt engineering?
- Fundamentals of prompt design
- Types of prompts (zero-shot, few-shot...
