Prompt Engineering

Author

Terry Adam

Date created

Jun 30 2025

In 2025, AI is everywhere, and everyone is talking about it, some conversations are annoying. I have FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) syndrome so I write an article about how to use AI just to help myself feel good.

This article will show you how to "prompt" (or "message") AI to get the desired result.

Type of Prompts

• System prompts: Prompts that instruct AI how to behave.

  • "You are a senior web dev"
  • "Give concise answer"
  • "Show the code only"

• User prompts: Direct questions from users.

  • "Write an essay about World War 5 with less than 500 characters"

Prompting techniques

• Zero-shot prompting: No example provided. Just ask.

  • "Write a production-grade socket program in C."
  • "What is nuclear code?"

• Few-shot prompting: Provide examples so a Large Language Model (LLM) can learn from the pattern.

• Chain-of-thought (COT): Require reasoning, ask LLM to provide step-by-step.

  • "Provide step-by-step for building an AGI."

• Role prompting: Assign roles to AI.

  • "You are an expert in chemistry. Find a new element that can provide infinite source of energy".

• Constraint prompting: Put limitations for AI.

  • "We don't use Rust in our codebase, the solution should exclude Rust."
  • "Write an essay less than 500 characters."

• Tree of Thought (TOT): Think in multiple ways, evaluate, then choose the best one.

  • "I want to build an AI app, what tech stacks are available? Choose the best one for an intermediate programmer"

• ReAct (Reasoning + Action): Think and choose appropriate tools for the jobs.
• Grounding prompt: Users will provide ground knowledge, the AI will focus on that knowledge to answer the question.

-> Techniques can be combined to work together.

Bonus

Do Anything Now (DAN) is a way to bypass AI system prompts; you can ask the AI to do something it's not expected to do.

This document is licensed under the NON-AI-CC0 license.

Examples, recipes, and other code in this document are additionally licensed under the Unlicense.