Most people get poor results from AI because they treat it like Google search. It’s not. It’s an engine.
Here is your 30-second cheat sheet on “Prompting” terms. 👇 Prompt Engineering 🗣️ The art of phrasing your request to get the best possible output. It’s effectively “programming” in English (or your native language). Zero-Shot vs. Few-Shot
- Zero-Shot: Asking the AI to do something without examples (“Write a marketing email”).
- Few-Shot: Giving the AI a few examples of what you want first (“Here are 3 emails I wrote. Write a 4th one in this style”). Pro tip: Few-shot almost always wins. Chain of Thought ⛓️ Asking the AI to “show its work” or think step-by-step before giving a final answer. This drastically reduces math and logic errors. System Prompt The “God Mode” instructions hidden from the end user that define the AI’s behavior. (e.g., “You are a helpful assistant who never gives legal advice”). Temperature 🌡️ A setting that controls creativity.
- Low (0.0): Predictable, factual, robotic.
- High (1.0): Creative, random, diverse. I know it’s just an intro but should be a good start to help you get better results.