Prompt

Prompt Engineering

Effective communication with AI is an art. A well-crafted prompt can be the difference between a generic, unhelpful response and a precise, insightful solution. This guide provides best practices for designing prompts that deliver optimal results.

Principles of Effective Prompting

• Clarity and Specificity: Be as clear and detailed as possible. Vague prompts lead to vague answers. Specify the desired format, tone, and level of detail.
• Provide Context: Give the AI enough background information to understand the request. This includes relevant data, constraints, and the overall goal.
• Use Examples: Show, don't just tell. Providing a few examples of the desired output (few-shot prompting) can significantly improve accuracy.
• Iterate and Refine: Don't expect the perfect response on the first try. Experiment with different phrasing, add more context, or break down complex tasks into smaller steps.

Prompting Techniques

Zero-Shot Prompting

Ask a direct question without providing any examples. This works best for simple tasks where the AI already has sufficient training data.

Example:

"Summarize the key benefits of using a component-based architecture in web development."

Few-Shot Prompting

Provide a few examples of the input and desired output to guide the AI's response. This is highly effective for tasks requiring a specific format or style.

Example:

"Translate the following English sentences to French:

English: Hello, how are you?
French: Bonjour, comment ça va?

English: I need to buy some groceries.
French: Je dois faire des courses.

English: What time is it?
French: "

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

Encourage the AI to break down a problem and "think" step-by-step before giving the final answer. This is useful for complex reasoning and multi-step problems.

Example:

"Q: A farmer has 15 cows. He sells all but 9 of them. How many cows does he have left?

A: The question is a bit of a riddle. The phrase "all but 9" means that 9 cows are the ones that were not sold. So, the farmer has 9 cows left.

Q: There are 3 birds on a wire. 2 of them decide to fly away. How many are left?

A: Let's think step by step. The birds 'deciding' to fly away doesn't mean they have flown away yet. So all 3 are still on the wire. The answer is 3."

Best Practices

• Assign a Role: Tell the AI to act as a specific persona (e.g., "Act as a senior software engineer...").
• Use Delimiters: Use characters like triple backticks (```), XML tags (<tag>), or dashes to clearly separate different parts of your prompt.
• Specify Output Format: Explicitly ask for the output in a specific format like JSON, Markdown, or a numbered list.
• Negative Prompts: Clearly state what you don't want to see in the response.

write tests first, then the code, then run the tests and update the code until tests pass

i have got some build errors, run 'pnpm build' to see the errors, and then fix them, and then run build until build passes

claude --dangerously-skip-permissions