2.6 KiB
1 – Be Clear and Direct
LLMs respond best to clear, explicit instructions. Being specific about your desired output improves results. If you want high-quality work, ask for it directly rather than expecting the model to guess.
Think of the LLM as a skilled new employee: They do not know your specific workflows yet. The more precisely you explain what you want, the better the result.
Golden Rule: If a colleague would be confused by your prompt without extra context, the LLM will be too.
Less Effective:
Create an analytics dashboard
More Effective:
Create an analytics dashboard. Include relevant features and interactions. Go beyond the basics to create a fully-featured implementation.
2 – Add Examples and Context to Improve Performance
Providing examples, context, or the reason behind your instructions helps the model understand your goals.
Less Effective:
NEVER use ellipses
More Effective:
Your response will be read aloud by a text-to-speech engine, so never use ellipses since the engine will not know how to pronounce them.
The model can generalize from the explanation.
3 – Use Sequential Steps
When the order of tasks matters, provide instructions as a numbered list.
Example:
1. Analyze the provided text for key themes.
2. Extract the top 5 most frequent terms.
3. Format the output as a table with columns: Term, Frequency, Context.
4 – Structure Prompts with Markers
Headings (e.g., # or ###) or backticks (``````) help the model parse complex prompts, especially when mixing instructions, context, and data.
Less Effective:
{text input here}
Summarize the text above as a bullet point list of the most important points.
More Effective:
# Text:
```{text input here}```
# Task:
Summarize the text above as a bullet point list of the most important points.
5 – Give the LLM a Role
Setting a role in your prompt focuses the LLM's behavior and tone. Even a single sentence makes a difference.
Example:
You are a helpful coding assistant specializing in Python.
You are a senior marketing expert with 10 years of experience in the aerospace industry.
6 – Prompt Language
LLMs are primarily trained on English text. They generally perform best with prompts written in English, especially for complex tasks.
- Recommendation: Write your prompts in English.
- If needed: You can ask the LLM to respond in your native language (e.g., "Answer in German").
- Note: This is especially important for smaller models, which may have limited multilingual capabilities.