Prompt Engineering 101

A simple guide to leveraging AI to enhance your prompting skills.

Want to see the power of prompt engineering for yourself? Check out this step by step guide where Claude provided a preliminary review of a 200+ page transcript in less than 15 minutes.

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When I first started using AI in 2023, I crafted every prompt from scratch.

Every. Single. Prompt.

While this experience helped me understand how to use AI effectively, this process was really inefficient and detracted from my attention to my practice.

Last year, I started playing around with prompt engineering: the practice of experimenting with different ways to improve the output generated by AI.

One thing this exploration has taught me: the power of using AI to generate and improve my AI prompts.

Today, I use these AI conversations to create prompts that are more comprehensive and better structured than any found on the internet, producing outputs I could never achieve on my own.

I strongly believe that prompts are going to be the “intellectual property” of the future and as a result that every person needs to understand the basics of prompt engineering.

If you want to get started on this same journey, here are a few frameworks to experiment with:

RTF: Role-Task-Format

Best for: Simple, straightforward tasks that need clear structure.

Role: Act like a [insert the role you want AI to take]
Task: Complete [insert task]
Format: Generate output in [insert format] format

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RISE: Role-Instructions-Steps-End Goal

Best for: Complex, multi-step processes that require detailed guidance.

Role: [insert AI's role]
Instructions: [Describe the task to complete.]
Steps to complete task: [Break the task down in detail]
End Goal: [What a good outcome looks like]

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CARE: Context-Action-Result-Example

Best for: Complex, multi-step processes that require detailed guidance.

Context: [Give background information]
Action: [Mention action needed]
Result: [Mention your goal]
Example: [Give some example outputs]

Want to get started with prompt engineering yourself?

Here are the exact prompts you need to leverage each framework to improve any given prompt: