The Missing Guide to Prompt Engineering

The Missing Guide to Prompt Engineering(appetals.com)

9 points by ishwarjha 347 days ago | 10 comments

simonw 347 days ago |

This looks AI generated.

There are places where it includes citation references like [15] (search for "on complex problems" on https://appetals.com/promptguide/advanced-techniques-for-pow... ) that are just text, they don't resolve to anything.

Other places repeat the same point twice for no apparent reason - the "Context window" section on https://appetals.com/promptguide/understanding-the-machine-m...

I spotted a few "not X but Y" constructions, like "You'll learn to communicate with AI like a pro, not like someone shouting into the void."

I don't think reading this is a good use of your time.

ishwarjha 347 days ago | |

Not AI generated. I initially thought of giving citations. It's all my study notes.

simonw 347 days ago | | |

I actually found the citations on the last page: https://appetals.com/promptguide/references/

If it's not AI generated there's something very weird about your writing style.

This page in particular comes across as straight up LLM hallucination: https://appetals.com/promptguide/resources-and-tools-for-pro... - it lists "Prompt Engineering Discord" and "LinkedIn Prompt Engineering Groups" without providing links to anything, then lists "Legal Prompts Library" and "Marketing Prompts Collection" and "Developer Prompts Repository" under "Industry-Specific Collections", each with three bullet points and again without linking to anything.

easyjohnny 347 days ago |

I'm a bit tired of prompting guides that basically revamp https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608

kingkongjaffa 347 days ago |

There's other criticism here about the writing quality (AI generated) but it's also quite out of date content-wise.

> Start with a basic prompt >Add Chain-of-Thought reasoning >Implement self-criticism >Add format constraints >Compare the quality and reliability of results

The 'techniques' are incredibly basic and Chain of thought isn't really relevant today considering there are models with COT 'baked in' i.e. the 'thinking mode' class of models.

kingkongjaffa 347 days ago | |

That being said I would love a up to date prompt engineering guide for getting the most out of the latest models in July 2025.

There doesn't seem to be too many incantations like there were before "think step by step".

The best thing I have found to use is meta prompting i.e. make a prompt designed to create prompts, and then use that resulting prompt to make specific targeted prompts.

You can then store these as custom GPTS in chatGPT or Claude projects.

satiated_grue 346 days ago |

Why have so many non-engineering things become "engineering"?

Prompting -> "prompt engineering".

"sudo make me a sandwich" -> privilege-escalation engineering while process engineering a food engineer.

ishwarjha 347 days ago |

Prompt engineering isn't going anywhere. People keep saying it's dead, that the next model will make it obsolete. They said the same thing about ChatGPT 4, then Claude, then Gemini Pro. Even though the AI models are becoming more powerful each day, a poorly prompted AI response could hinder your ability to get the right results.

jofzar 347 days ago |

> This is prompt engineering. Though the term suggests something mechanical, something reducible to formulas and best practices, the reality proves more nuanced—perhaps more human—than we'd care to admit

Ah nothing like a double emdash early to know that the page is not worth reading.

baal80spam 347 days ago | |

I am waiting for the workaround:

generated_prompt.replace("—","-")

before posting.