ChatGPT - Prompt Engineering?!

Have you heard the term "prompt engineering" during the last four weeks? If not, it's time to catch up!

Sure, you have heard of ChatGPT lately and probably also tried it, but the ChatGPT interface somewhat hides the concept of prompt engineering. It is much more than just asking some questions from this LLM (Large Language Model). It is the vast and deep domain of your thinking.

The most common use case for ChatGPT is to ask it to answer your question. But what about thinking about it another way: make it generate questions for you. Now you have a discussion companion that is never tired of listening to you!

That already is prompt engineering.

The main concepts of prompt engineering are system prompt, context prompt (static and dynamic), action prompt, and continuous prompting.

The system prompt specifies the nature of the chatting partner. You can indicate if it needs to be concise in answers, humorous, or direct. You can also specify in what domain it is professional.

The context prompt informs the domain you are in. For example, if you ask it what the best oil is, it doesn't know if you are cooking, servicing your car, or doing skincare. Context can also be dynamic when GPT is used as part of an application, like the location where you are or the row of the database you are looking at.

The action prompt is naturally the request from you to ChatGPT to do something. It is better to be very specific with GPT, so maybe you also tell it what not to do and what kind of answers you do not want to see.

Continuous prompting is your additional guidance or questions after the first real answer. ChatGPT is not perfect, not even GPT-4, though it is much more accurate. It will augment your thinking, not replace it.

Tip: when you make these many long prompts, you can also instruct it to answer with "yes" after it has read the prompt when it doesn't yet have any real action. This saves tokens, so words, in your dialogue. (Token is about four letters).

As you can see, the most important asset is your imagination. By the way, do you know what is the best way to improve your imagination? No, don't ask ChatGPT - that is definitely the wrong answer!

Prompt Management

Now that you have prompts, the question is how to manage them. They are now your important assets and IP. You don't want to waste them, and the ChatGPT user interface is definitely not the right place to manage these. You can have them in your favorite word processor or maybe in an Excel spreadsheet.

Commercial tip: if you have a whole organization that needs to manage prompts and the content that programs GPT for your organization or customer use, you can contact us, as the Koivu Cloud is the low-code application development platform also for ChatGPT applications with web, mobile, and Excel user interfaces.

(This is genuine human-generated text.)