Advanced Prompt Techniques

Once you've mastered the basics, these advanced techniques will take your prompt engineering to the professional level.

Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting encourages the AI to show its reasoning process, leading to more accurate and explainable outputs.

How to Use CoT

Add phrases like:

• "Let's think through this step by step"
• "Walk me through your reasoning"
• "Show your work"

Example

Basic prompt: "What is 17 × 24?" CoT prompt: "What is 17 × 24? Think through this step by step."

The CoT version produces:

1. 17 × 20 = 340
2. 17 × 4 = 68
3. 340 + 68 = 408

Few-Shot Learning

Provide examples to teach the AI your desired pattern.

Convert these sentences to formal business English:

Input: "gonna send the report tomorrow"
Output: "I will send the report tomorrow."

Input: "cant make it to the meeting"
Output: "I am unable to attend the meeting."

Input: "we should probs discuss this later"
Output:

Self-Consistency

Generate multiple responses and take the majority answer. This is especially useful for:

• Complex reasoning tasks
• Ambiguous questions
• High-stakes decisions

Tree of Thoughts

Break complex problems into a tree structure:

Problem: Design a marketing strategy for a new product

Branch 1: Target Audience
  - Demographics
  - Pain points
  - Buying behavior

Branch 2: Channels
  - Social media
  - Content marketing
  - Paid advertising

Branch 3: Messaging
  - Value proposition
  - Key benefits
  - Call to action

Role Prompting at Scale

Combine multiple expert perspectives:

Analyze this business plan from three perspectives:
1. As a venture capitalist focused on ROI
2. As a marketing expert focused on go-to-market strategy
3. As a technical advisor focused on feasibility

Provide distinct insights from each viewpoint.

Prompt Chaining

Break complex tasks into sequential prompts:

1. Prompt 1: Generate outline
2. Prompt 2: Expand each section
3. Prompt 3: Add examples and data
4. Prompt 4: Polish and format

Meta-Prompting

Ask the AI to improve your prompts:

I want to generate product descriptions. Here's my current prompt:
"Write a description for [product]"

How can I improve this prompt to get more compelling, 
conversion-focused descriptions?

Best Practices

1. Test systematically - Change one variable at a time
2. Document what works - Build a prompt library
3. Know your model - Different AIs respond differently
4. Iterate relentlessly - Great prompts are refined, not written