Chipress

Google released its “Gemini Prompting Guide 101” a while ago. Though the majority of the examples in this guide use Google Workspace for illustration purposes, it still provides a general ideal of writing effective prompts for all LLMs.

The guide Four first illustrates the 4 main areas for effective prompts:

1. Persona, i.e., assign a role to LLM to encourage creativity
2. Task, i.e., what would you like the LLM to do
3. Context, e.g., use your own documents to provide contexts for LLM
4. Formatting, e.g., provide constraints for LLM output results, such as character count limits, number of options you would like to generate, table or bullet formatting, etc.

It then lists a quite a few use cases for writing effective prompts, among which we find the followings are the most useful for engineer folks:

1. Communication, e.g., communicate technical topics to non-technical audiences
2. Streamline the task management
3. Project management, e.g., report on project status, develop issue trackers, create workback schedules
4. Brainstorm ideas and possible causes of a technical issue

At the end of the guide, it shares some more tips on prompt writing, including:

1. Break one large task to several related subtasks, and use separate prompts for each subtask
2. Make the prompts conversational. Fine-tune the prompts if the results do not meet your expectations or if you believe there is room for improvement. Use follow-up prompts for “say it another way”. An iterative process often yields better results
3. Ask for feedback, e.g., “what questions do you have for me that would help you provide the best output?”
4. Ask for outputs to have a specific tone for your targeted audiences, such as formal, informal, technical, entertaining, or casual

We encourage everyone to check it out.

References

1. https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/gemini-for-google-workspace-prompting-guide-101.pdf