Once you're confident with the basics of prompt engineering, try using the following advanced techniques designed to improve accuracy and unlock more powerful results.

Few-shot prompting

With few-shot prompting, you give the AI a few examples of the kind of response you want so it can learn the pattern.

How to use it:

Let's say you're writing short summaries of customer support tickets. You give the model a couple of examples showing how each ticket is turned into a simple summary. Then you upload a new ticket and ask it to do the same.

Chain of thought prompting

In chain of thought prompting, you ask the AI to explain its thinking step by step instead of leaping straight to an answer. This leads to more logical, thoughtful responses — especially for tasks that involve planning or calculations.

How to use it:

Simply add the phrase "think step by step" to your prompt, and see the difference in output.

Self-consistency prompting

Have you ever asked an AI model the same question multiple times and received different answers? Self-consistency prompting involves doing exactly this — asking the same question several times, then comparing the responses to find the most consistent or reliable one.

How to use it:

Let's say you're trying to decide if a change to your product is risky. You ask the AI, “Is this a high-risk change? Explain your reasoning.” If four out of five answers agree it is, you can feel more confident in that result.

Automatic prompt engineering

Automatic prompt engineering is a way to automate the prompt-writing process by asking the AI to generate prompts for you. This is helpful when you’re not sure how to phrase a request, or want to explore multiple ways to get better results. It’s usually an iterative process: the model generates several prompt options, and you test or refine the best ones.

How to use it:

Instruct the AI to write you a few possible prompts for a certain task, then evaluate and tweak the best one. For example, "I’m building a prompt to extract action items from meeting notes. Generate 5 possible prompts that would help with that."