A beginner-friendly cheat sheet for prompt engineering techniques.
- Zero-Shot - Simple everyday task
- CRAFT Framework - Need a complete, structured prompt
- Prefixing - Steer direction by starting the sentence
- Questions - Simple H-question prompts
- Commands - Strong action verb prompts
- Chain of Thought - Want AI to think before answering
- Clarifying Questions - Need more info before starting
- Few-Shot - Show AI what style you want
- Prompt Chaining - Big task to break into steps
- Session Priming - Starting a new work session
- Self-Consistency - High-stakes decision, need confidence
- Negative Prompting - AI keeps doing things you don't want
- Tree of Thought - Comparing multiple options
- Meta Prompting - Need reusable prompt template
- Generate Knowledge - AI needs context before answering
- RAG - Need current or your own data
- ART - AI should use tools automatically
- APE - Want better prompts without effort
- Active-Prompt - Prompt keeps getting things wrong
- PAL - Need precise calculations
- Multimodal CoT - Have screenshots or diagrams
- Graph Prompting - Need to map relationships
- Structured Output - Code needs to read the output
- Emotion/Stakes - Need extra thorough response
- Context Window Management - Understanding AI memory limits
- Contrastive Prompting - AI keeps getting it almost right
- System Prompts - Building AI apps or setting permanent rules
- Prompt Security - Building secure AI-powered apps
- AI Agents - Autonomous goal-oriented AI
- MCP - Connecting AI to external tools and services
- Skills - Pre-built instruction packages for consistent results
- Tools - Built-in AI capabilities that make things happen