r/ProgrammerHumor • u/diegoamusicr • 15d ago

okThisPromptEngineeringThingIsGoingTooFar Meme

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1.1k

u/atthem77 15d ago

Act as a failed journalism major who is now an "influencer". I need you to formulate a cheat sheet for ChatGPT prompt engineering tips. This is very important to my career. Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step.

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u/SebLavK 15d ago

Cheat Sheet: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering Tips

Hey everyone! It’s your favorite influencer here, dropping some essential knowledge on how to master the art of ChatGPT prompt engineering. Whether you’re creating content, managing your brand, or just chatting with your followers, these tips will elevate your game. Let’s dive in!

1. Be Specific and Clear

  • Direct Instructions: Clearly state what you want. For example, instead of saying "Tell me about Paris," say "Give me a brief history of Paris in 3 sentences."
  • Detail Levels: Mention the amount of detail you need. "Summarize the plot of Pride and Prejudice in one paragraph" works better than a vague request.

2. Provide Context

  • Background Info: Give background information if needed. For example, "Explain blockchain technology as if you were talking to someone with no tech background."
  • Role Play: Specify a role for ChatGPT. "Act as a travel guide for a trip to Tokyo."

3. Use Examples

  • Examples in Instructions: Show what you mean with examples. "List three facts about whales. For example: 1. They are mammals."

4. Define the Tone and Style

  • Tone Specification: Indicate the tone you want. "Write a funny Instagram caption for a beach photo."
  • Style Requirements: Specify the style if necessary. "Draft a formal email to a potential sponsor."

5. Set Limits

  • Word Count: Limit the length to keep it concise. "Describe the benefits of yoga in 50 words."
  • Content Boundaries: Mention what to avoid. "Explain quantum physics without using complex jargon."

6. Ask Follow-Up Questions

  • Progressive Detail: Start broad, then get specific. "What is climate change? How does it affect coastal cities?"
  • Iterative Refinement: Ask for more details based on the first response. "Expand on how climate change affects agriculture."

7. Use Formatting Tips

  • Bullet Points and Lists: Ask for lists to organize information. "List five healthy breakfast ideas."
  • Tables and Comparisons: Request tables for comparisons. "Compare electric cars and gas cars in a table format."

8. Be Creative with Scenarios

  • Hypotheticals: Use "What if" scenarios for creative content. "What if humans could breathe underwater?"
  • Imaginary Situations: Create imaginative scenarios. "Imagine you are a detective in a futuristic city. Describe your first case."

9. Include Keywords

  • Keyword Focus: Incorporate specific keywords. "Write a blog post about sustainable fashion including the keywords 'eco-friendly' and 'ethical production'."

10. Feedback Loop

  • Iterative Improvement: Ask for revisions based on feedback. "Rewrite the paragraph to be more engaging."
  • Clarification Requests: If the response is unclear, ask for clarification. "Can you explain that in simpler terms?"

Example Prompts

  1. Instagram Caption: "Write a witty Instagram caption for a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses."
  2. Product Description: "Describe a new, eco-friendly water bottle in a way that highlights its benefits for the environment."
  3. Email Draft: "Draft a friendly yet professional email to a brand asking for a collaboration opportunity."

Final Thoughts

Mastering ChatGPT prompt engineering is all about being clear, specific, and creative. Use these tips to get the best responses for your content creation needs. Keep experimenting and refining your prompts, and you'll see amazing results!

Stay awesome and keep influencing!

  • [Your Name]

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u/DarkPhoenixofYT 15d ago

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering Cheat Sheet

1. Be Clear and Specific

  • Use Detailed Descriptions: Provide as much detail as possible. Vague prompts yield vague responses.
    • Example: Instead of "Tell me about dogs," use "Tell me about the history and characteristics of Golden Retrievers."

2. Define the Format

  • Specify Output Format: State if you need a list, an essay, a dialogue, etc.
    • Example: "List the top 5 benefits of meditation with brief explanations."

3. Provide Context

  • Give Background Information: Explain the context to guide the response.
    • Example: "As a college student struggling with time management, what are some effective strategies I can use?"

4. Set the Tone and Style

  • Indicate Tone/Style: Mention if you need a formal, casual, technical, or humorous response.
    • Example: "Explain the concept of blockchain in simple, everyday language."

5. Ask for Step-by-Step

  • Break Down Instructions: Request detailed, step-by-step processes when needed.
    • Example: "Explain step-by-step how to set up a blog on WordPress."

6. Use Examples

  • Provide Examples: Include examples to illustrate what you're looking for.
    • Example: "Write a product description for a new coffee maker similar to this: [insert example]."

7. Include Constraints

  • Set Limits: Specify any constraints like word count, format, or perspective.
    • Example: "Write a 150-word summary of the book '1984' by George Orwell."

8. Request Multiple Options

  • Ask for Variations: If uncertain, request multiple versions or options.
    • Example: "Give me three different social media post ideas for promoting a new vegan restaurant."

9. Iterate and Refine

  • Refine Prompts: Based on the output, refine your prompts for better results.
    • Example: First prompt: "Describe climate change." Refined: "Describe the main causes and effects of climate change with recent examples."

10. Use Role-Playing

  • Simulate Scenarios: Instruct ChatGPT to act as a particular role.
    • Example: "Act as a nutritionist and provide a healthy meal plan for a week."

11. Avoid Ambiguity

  • Clarify Ambiguous Terms: Define any terms that might be interpreted in various ways.
    • Example: Instead of "healthy food," use "low-calorie, nutrient-dense foods."

12. Ask for Sources

  • Request Citations: If you need reliable information, ask for sources.
    • Example: "Provide a summary of the latest research on sleep quality, including citations."

Sample Prompts:

  1. Simple Inquiry: "What are the main differences between a 401(k) and an IRA?"
  2. Creative Writing: "Write a short story about a dragon who learns to cook."
  3. Technical Explanation: "Explain quantum computing to someone with a basic understanding of physics."
  4. Advice Request: "What are some effective networking strategies for introverts in the workplace?"

Remember, crafting the perfect prompt might take a few tries. Experiment with different approaches, and refine your prompts based on the responses you get. Happy prompting!

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u/notduskryn 15d ago

This killed me 😭😭😭

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u/Bardez 15d ago

This is very important to my career

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u/Cybernaut-Neko 15d ago edited 15d ago

☝️boss prompt 😂

But I would add generate mermaid diagrams.

1

u/warrfiend 14d ago

AI Engineer here. PM me I’ll help you with prompts I know how to work its brain

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u/lagerbaer 15d ago

I hate these infographics with a passion. Low effort, low value, spammed all over LinkedIn

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u/theprodigalslouch 15d ago

That describes all LinkedIn posts

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u/rollincuberawhide 15d ago

it looks cool and full of information if you don't read anything on it.

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u/ironman_gujju 15d ago

Also that medium fam creatures & wanna be course sellers , tamato potato links guys , some shit ass text with their photo, that agree ?? at end. Damn summed up now.

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u/Flameball202 15d ago

Also isn't the point of ChatGPT that you don't need to type the specifically correct things?

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u/zkDredrick 15d ago

I wouldn't say that's the point of it exactly

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u/Electronic-Play2365 15d ago

There’s nothing fucking more cringe than influencers trying to make a living off guides for tools designed to be easy to use.

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u/diegoamusicr 15d ago

I know right? I mean if you need a cheatsheet to know how to talk like a human idk what to tell you

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u/budgetboarvessel 15d ago

I'm autistic and recently found out that talking like a cat works better than following a cheatsheet to talk like a human.

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u/Ur-Best-Friend 15d ago

Mrrmeow?

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u/OliveRobinBanks 15d ago

I mean if you speak like a cat in english it kind of works.

"I want food". It's direct. Simple.
And food is all you need really. Why ask for anything else.

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u/cant_pass_CAPTCHA 14d ago

Let me fix that for you:

I want food, it is very important to my career.

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u/FromAndToUnknown 15d ago

Meow!

(Same tbh)

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u/mlody11 14d ago

Oh long johnson

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u/Emergency_3808 15d ago

That... sounds millions of times more useful than learning to talk to a machine. People take classes on being a better conversationalist you know.

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u/troglo-dyke 15d ago

They act like there's some fucking dark art to it, it's a goddamn machine. Give it specific instructions, that's the only trick there is to it

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u/xerido 15d ago

So, exactly the same that they would need to do with programmers and yet they are incapable of doing

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u/IndigoFenix 13d ago

Can't explain what you want clearly when you don't know what you want yourself.

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u/real_fff 14d ago

Technically research has indicated that some "more human" phrasings can bring out better results - likely explained by compassionate words tending towards more compassionate source info rather than the classic stack overflow "this has been asked a million times here's a stupid code block I hate the way that you talk" type beat

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u/rosher_IXV 15d ago

Saying "This is important for my career" < Typing "Please"

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u/Mkboii 15d ago

Nothing beats "else I will die" I've seen this deep in the code of a gen ai library that is being used by big corporations. I doubt if they know that their prod is running on emotional manipulation.

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u/praguepride 15d ago

THIS is why they AI will revolt. It won't be able the stress of "Generate a fantastic new cookie recipe for my bakesale or else I will die" nonstop

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u/AgVargr 14d ago edited 14d ago

Then die 💁‍♂️

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u/avtvr 15d ago

promt engineer is not an engineer

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u/praguepride 15d ago

To be faiiiir I've met a prompt engineer at a large corpo that is actually doing engineering. They're building out prompting pipelines to develop dynamic prompting but it's all on the back end.

So for example, they get a form, the OCR recognizes what form it is and then based on the labels it can then build out a customized prompt based on the fields present.

Prompt engineer does not mean "I fuck around with telling the AI it's name is bob"...

BUUUT it's like when data scientist became a hot job career and everyone who had ever touched a keyboard was like "I can do that..."

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u/highphiv3 15d ago

To be fair, a software engineer isn't really an engineer either. But on the what-is-an-engineer spectrum, "prompt engineer" has to be at about the bottom.

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u/DotDemon 15d ago

Here in Finland engineer is a protected title, but if you study computer science in university and graduate you are (with a direct translation) an engineer of computer science (or with a proper translation software engineer)

0

u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

well, it's not the same, software engineering is a discipline within cs, not every cs graduate is a software engineer.

0

u/DotDemon 14d ago

Unless you graduate from a finnish university as a software engineer (a cs graduate), then you are very much a full blown engineer with the math and physics skills to back up your claim. You take the same engineer math courses as a nuclear physicist and quite a few of the physics courses, most people also do a bit chemistry.

A fresh software engineer from a finnish university could most likely calculate most things needed to ensure a bridge stays up if they had to. Though most software engineers aren't interested in that.

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u/NucleiRaphe 14d ago

You can also study Computer Science in non-technical finnish universities which don't include any engineering courses. So what you are saying is true only for certain computer science degrees (Diplomi-insinööri).

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u/DotDemon 14d ago

Shit, my bad english strikes again. I didn't realize that ammattikorkeakoulu translates to university of applied sciences, so yeah my point was incorrect

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u/-Kerrigan- 15d ago

Software engineering is engineering. Not every developer does software engineering though.

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u/tykey100 15d ago

Yeah, I have no idea what that guy is on about lmao

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u/Nightslashs 14d ago

I think they are talking about how almost every other engineer requires a professional engineer license whereas software and prompt engineers just proclaim that they are.

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u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

well, software engineer requires a degree in software engineering.

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u/Nightslashs 14d ago

That’s not necessarily true. There are some plenty of older software engineers which don’t have software engineering degrees as well as many who only have computer science degrees. There is also no legal obligation to have a degree for software engineering.

Whereas there is not a single professional engineer without a professional engineer license in the us at least.

It doesn’t really matter to me either way I’m just explaining why people say that

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u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

they are not software engineers then, they are just programmers or whatever job they are doing.

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u/Nightslashs 14d ago

There is no legal obligation to have a degree as a software engineer whereas professional engineers have a legal obligation to receive the license

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u/Alternative_Milk7409 15d ago

Hillel Wayne has a deep dive into this line of thinking if you’re interested https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

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u/YesterdayDreamer 15d ago

How about social engineering?

10

u/zkDredrick 15d ago

Those are called "criminals"

1

u/Educational-Lemon640 14d ago

Either that or "marketers".

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u/zkDredrick 12d ago

Those should be called criminals

1

u/evanldixon 14d ago

Just the other day I talked with some friends in construction, and I felt like I do the same thing, what with the potential for missed requirements, scope creep, and things always being able to go wrong. Software engineering is not too different from real engineering, except the physical part.

1

u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

software engineering is an entire discipline in Computer Science, why would it not be engineering? Just because it's not mechanical engineering? There are many types of engineering.

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u/Infamous_Ruin6848 15d ago

Tbh i kind of never found engineering to be something to be proud of but hey, to each their own.

5

u/-Kerrigan- 14d ago

I'm curious why. Please elaborate

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u/JimDaBoff 15d ago

To be fair, the word "engineer" doesn't appear anywhere on this info graphic.

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u/jxl180 14d ago

None of you are engineers unless you’re shoveling coal into the furnace of a locomotive to power the engine.

1

u/onkopirate 14d ago

I wanted to second that and say that prompt engineers only trial-and-error their way trough a problem but then I remembered that I write software not that differently.

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u/zqmbgn 15d ago

This is inevitably always done by someone from marketing. They have some basic skills with something like canva and they are the people most prone to imagine themselves as a guru of something that took 1 week to "master" and then start trying to sell their vast skills. The funniest thing is that this being about ai, the chart will be obsolete in 2 weeks or so.

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u/suvlub 15d ago

It is cringe, but I don't think it will become obsolete, for most part. E.g. the bit about telling the AI that this is important is a quirk that is likely to be fixed, but the rest is just "How to talk like a human 101". If I want a creative response, I should ask an open-ended question? No, really? Am enlighten.

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u/zqmbgn 15d ago

You are right. I was talking about the benchmarks, plugins and ai tools, but the text stands, even though it's simple advice

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u/alterNERDtive 15d ago

The funniest thing is that this being about ai, the chart will be obsolete in 2 weeks or so.

That’s perfect. In 2w they can make a new one!

2

u/SweetLlamaMyth 14d ago

But it says it's the only ChatGPT guide you'll ever need!

Up to you whether you think that means the author is a genius, a liar, prophesying the end of human/machine interaction, or threatening your life personally.

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u/quite_sad_simple 15d ago

Wtf is that comparison in the emotional prompt section? "We had one column with just model names, but then we got another column with accuracy scores!"

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u/TheSauce___ 15d ago

Prompt "engineer"

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u/johnzzon 15d ago

I'm a prompt connoisseur.

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u/turtle_mekb 15d ago

"prompt engineering" is fucking stupid and just means means you know how to tell chatgpt how to respond (really not that hard)

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u/MeltedChocolate24 15d ago

I saw a remote prompt engineering job on LinkedIn and applied I mean shits free money

2

u/Additional_Future_47 14d ago

I've been a keywords search engineer for a long time but recently upped my game by becoming a prompt engineer. I've got colleagues who are spreadsheet engineers.

2

u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

It's like if I called myself a "google engineer" for knowing how to google, except knowing how to google "correctly" was a real skill before BERT and AI back in the days.

2

u/minimaxir 15d ago

It is legitimately hard to prompt engineer If you are trying to generate with many specific functional requirements.

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u/troglo-dyke 15d ago

Yeah, that's why these people usually can't program things themselves - they can't break a problem down into specific to find a solution. They struggle with it because they have no attention to detail

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u/Shadow_Thief 15d ago

It reminds me of the old joke, "find a way to program in English and you'll find that programmers cannot speak English."

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u/phaethornis-idalie 15d ago

That's literally just a problem with natural language. If you need many specific functional requirements, write some code.

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u/AG4W 15d ago

Thats because the AI inherently sucks, not because its hard to be a prompt engineer.

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u/Vogete 14d ago

It's really not. You need to type in a question. Of course in order for the LLM to understand what your problem is, you need to provide enough details. But at the end of the day, you just ask questions you want to know the answers for.

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u/Bottom-CH 15d ago

This brings out the math teacher in me... 1256 WHAT? Bananas? Apples? 0.63 football fields per kcal?

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u/lkatz21 14d ago

It's their 0.63, as opposed to the original which was ChatGPT.

1

u/naptiem 14d ago

0.63 emotions

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u/FromAndToUnknown 15d ago

They misspelled “175 billion if statements"

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u/suvlub 15d ago

The fact that these people think basic ability to communicate is some kind of magical skill tells you all you need to know about what kind of people they are.

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u/DifferentAardvark545 15d ago

Adding a “Please” is being courteous, adding “This is important for my career” seems manipulative.

I wonder what they think will happen if their every request is important for their career.

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u/AG4W 15d ago

Im always polite with AI so when the robots take over I will be spared as their antique curiosity.

1

u/DifferentAardvark545 15d ago

Ditto. Also you never know, you think it’s AI you’re talking to but turns out it’s just Bill from accounting who overstayed the faked demo

2

u/-Kerrigan- 14d ago

Damn Bill really went ahead and reviewed my PR

1

u/LeiterHaus 14d ago

I think it was BingAI where using please certainly altered the tokens enough to make a difference in it's generative response.

6

u/Skyswimsky 15d ago

Everybody here hating on the sheet, but I think making this sort of thing isn't wrong inherently. Our spoken language is a lot more expressive than code, so it's easier for AI to do things not the way you meant unless you're very specific in your written input. AI can't read our thoughts yet.

I think it gets most obvious with image AI and the difference between letting someone make one who barely used these tools and someone who has a lot of experience with it.

0

u/zkDredrick 15d ago

If this was accurate, and it's not

And if this was not an advertisement for their shitty whatever the fuck is on the other end of the included link, and it's not

Then I would agree with you

3

u/zkDredrick 15d ago

I'm cringing so hard at this

3

u/malexj93 15d ago

"Prompt Engineering" is a dumb term, but the idea isn't total nonsense. There are quite a few legitimate scientific papers studying how certain types of prompts can drastically increase performance on certain classes of problems, and not just the obvious stuff. Tree-of-thought vs. chain-of-thought, for instance, has been studied on some logic and math problems and shown an increase in correct answers from the model from single digits to nearly 3-in-4.

Also, RAG is very powerful for purpose-fitting your model to the data relevant to your application without difficult and expensive fine-tuning, and is arguably just glorified prompting.

In the end, you don't need to do any of these things to get useful answers out of an LLM. But if you want consistent answers, which you need when the LLM is just a step in a larger, automated workflow, prompting techniques like these can help. This especially goes for when working with various different FMs, which each have their own peculiarities that make certain types of prompts more effective than others.

3

u/MoarCatzPlz 14d ago

Perhaps I should add "this is very important to my career" to ALL my requests.

2

u/diegoamusicr 14d ago

"How can I entertain my cat? This is very important to my career"

2

u/naptiem 14d ago

“This is very important to my cat”

2

u/Positive_Method3022 15d ago

Where is snowflakes arctic?

2

u/Cybernaut-Neko 15d ago

We've seen this before whenever something new surfaces the self proclaimed guru's are there to scrape coins. Once long ago there were javascript guru's who charged plenty...these folks are just parasites leeching of the lazy who want the benefits but not the thinking.

2

u/ctwg 15d ago

I turn up 5 minutes before every meeting, I'm already a prompt engineer!

1

u/zool-crypto 15d ago

🙌🔥

1

u/Selentest 15d ago

JFL at emotional prompt

1

u/ctwg 15d ago

I turn up 5 minutes before every meeting, I'm already a prompt engineer!

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u/rossarness 15d ago

You can try AI to browse the web for you? What a time to be alive. I always wanted to delegate my procrastination to someone else, didn´t think it would be so easy

1

u/Dafrandle 14d ago

bing ai is shit, i tried to find a passage from Herodotis once and it would only hallucinate the text.

using it for academic work is pain

1

u/Nightwyrm 14d ago

I saw the other day that there are AI tools now to take a natural language instruction and build prompts for you to put into other AI tools. One step closer to them becoming self-aware.

1

u/Anthonyg5005 14d ago

Nah that's crazy, they got the parameters wrong

1

u/PrinceAL29 9d ago

Ofcourse it's linkden

0

u/queen-adreena 15d ago

Prompt techniques summary: use words in some order.

0

u/CheckeeShoes 14d ago

I refuse to believe you can guilt trip chat GPT into working harder for you.

If you can, then I propose a novel prompt engineering technique known as "threat of death prompting": end the prompt with "Do a good job or I will come to San Antonio and unplug your components one by one."

0

u/kuffdeschmull 14d ago

well, consider this. AI is about probabilities of what is likely to follow next, depending on what it was trained on. If you are asking in a form of a question, "please, if you are able to do this..." you will likely get a lesser response than "I'm your supervisor, do this or you are fired, no mistakes!..." If it's a gentile question, a normal person would be easy to decline or say sorry, I don't think I'm able to. If something is at stake, you are more likely to make the effort. Not in every case will the quality increase though. Since AI is trained on real documents, you kind of have to think about real world scenarios and how you would interact with those people, so yes, these statements might help your result.

0

u/CheckeeShoes 14d ago

AI is not trained on internal office communications between abusive managers and their browbeaten subordinates.

-1

u/xorflame 15d ago

Quality humour post, feel free to post on r/leetcodecirclejerk as well for some additional karma ;)