The official documentation by OpenAI has a lot of hidden gems like this guide.

Much better than any “prompt infographic” by Twitter threadbois.

Table of Contents

1. Write clear instructions

• Include details in your query to get more relevant answers
• Ask the model to adopt a persona
• Use delimiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input
• Specify the steps required to complete a task
• Provide examples
• Specify the desired length of the output

2. Provide reference text

• Instruct the model to answer using a reference text
• Instruct the model to answer with citations from a reference text

3. Split complex tasks into simpler subtasks

• Use intent classification to identify the most relevant instructions for a user query
• For dialogue applications that require very long conversations, summarize or filter previous dialogue
• Summarize long documents piecewise and construct a full summary recursively

4. Give GPTs time to “think”

• Instruct the model to work out its own solution before rushing to a conclusion
• Use inner monologue or a sequence of queries to hide the model’s reasoning process
• Ask the model if it missed anything on previous passes

5. Use external tools

• Use embeddings-based search to implement efficient knowledge retrieval
• Use code execution to perform more accurate calculations or call external APIs
• Give the model access to specific functions

6. Test changes systematically

• Evaluate model outputs with reference to gold-standard answers