One of the most lucrative corporate skills these days is effective prompting — making requests of chatbots to get what you want — but it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Chatbots are like children. They will do only what you ask, if even that, and nothing more. To get what you want, you have to be explicit and specific.
AI startup Anthropic is offering some help on this front. The company recently published a “Prompt Engineering Overview” to help users get started.
While its guide applies to pretty much any chatbot, it’s tailored to its own, Claude.
The first order of business, Anthropic says, is to understand exactly what Claude is. “When interacting with Claude, think of it as a brilliant but very new employee (with amnesia) who needs explicit instructions,” the company says in its guide.
The second is to have a rough idea or draft of your question and a sense of what a successful outcome might look like. Anthropic also offers a “prompt generator” for the first draft.
Then it becomes all about refining that initial prompt. Here are Anthropic’s top tips.
Be specific with your prompts
“Claude does not have context on your norms, styles, guidelines, or preferred ways of working. The more precisely you explain what you want, the better Claude’s response will be,” Anthropic says.
The company suggests telling the chatbot what the results will be used for and what audience it is meant for. You should also tell Claude, or whatever chatbot you are using, what the end goal of the task is.
The more you can organize the directions, the better. Anthropic even recommends laying out the requests as bullet points or a numbered list.
Be generous with examples
“Examples are your secret weapon shortcut for getting Claude to generate exactly what you need,” Anthropic says. “By providing a few well-crafted examples in your prompt, you can dramatically improve the accuracy, consistency, and quality of Claude’s outputs.”
This strategy is sometimes called multi-shot prompting. Anthropic says that giving examples reduces misinterpretation and enforces uniform structure and style.
Give the chatbot space to think
“Giving Claude space to think can dramatically improve its performance,” Anthropic says. “This technique, known as chain of thought (CoT) prompting, encourages Claude to break down problems step-by-step, leading to more accurate and nuanced outputs.”
This means a user will get the most out of a chatbot if they lay out the chain of steps so it can think through each one before answering. “This thorough reasoning leads to a more confident and justifiable recommendation,” Anthropic says.
Roleplay
Anthropic says one of the most effective strategies is to assign the chatbot a specific role, like “news editor” or “financial planner.”
“This technique, known as role prompting, is the most powerful way to use system prompts with Claude,” the company says.
“In complex scenarios like legal analysis or financial modeling, role prompting can significantly boost Claude’s performance.”
Assigning roles can ensure you get exactly what you want. Maybe you want the brevity of a news writer, or maybe you want the tone of an academic.
Reduce hallucinations
Chatbots make things up, which is why you have to check everything they say. But there are some simple ways to reduce those hallucinations.
Anthtropic says the best thing you can do is give the chatbot permission to say, “I don’t know.”
“Explicitly give Claude permission to admit uncertainty. This simple technique can drastically reduce false information,” Anthropic says.
You can also ask Claude and other chatbots to cite their claims with sources. “You can also have Claude verify each claim by finding a supporting quote after it generates a response. If it can’t find a quote, it must retract the claim,” Anthropic says.
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