I’ve seen people drop 8-hour-long videos on prompt engineering, and honestly, my reaction is 🤦♂️. I won’t bore you with the obvious stuff or overcomplicate things. Instead, I want to share a few practical techniques that actually helped me write better prompts, some common sense, some hard-earned lessons.
## Specificity
This one seems obvious, but it’s also the most commonly missed. A vague prompt gives you a vague answer. The more precise you are about your goal, format, and constraints, the better the result.
Bad Prompt: `Write something about climate change.`
Good Prompt: `Write a 100-word summary on how climate change affects sea levels, using simple language for a high school audience.`
## Hallucination Guardrail
We all know that LLMs hallucinate, they confidently make stuff up. A surprisingly simple trick: Tell it not to.
Try this prompt: `If you don’t know the answer, respond with ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t make anything up.`
## Order Matters
This was a surprise to me and I learned it from the book. Where you place your instruction in a long prompt matters. Either put it right at the start or at the end. LLMs often forget what’s in the middle (especially in long prompts).
## Other Techniques That Help Me Daily
– **Persona:** Set the role clearly. `You are an expert Python developer who writes clean code.`
– **Audience Awareness:** My favorite when I want to simplify things. `Explain this like I’m five.`
– **Tone:** Underrated but essential. `Write this in a professional tone for a client.` vs `Make this sound like I’m texting a friend.`
– **Instruction / Context:** Always useful. `Summarize the following news article in bullet points.`
– **Grammar Fixing:** As a non-native English speaker, this one’s gold for me. `Fix the grammar and make it sound more natural.`