Speaker: Martin Rojas (@martinrojas)

See the DevNexus live blog table of contents for more posts

Slides online

General

• Prompting is the new code switching [it took me a minute to realize he meant the ENglish language one]

Components

• System Message – sets behavior and role
• Instruction – what to do
• Context – background data
• Examples – pattern demonstration
• Constraints – output limits
• Delimiters – section separation

Markdown

• Most common prompting language. Still text but gives structure
• Headings, bold, list, code

Prompt types

• Zero shot – direct instruction – simple/fast but inconsistent quality
• One shot – format setting – consistent format, but limited pattern learning
• Few shot – pattern learning – adapts to context, but token intesive
• Role based – behavioral framing – consistent voice, but might override other instructions

Techniques

• Clarity and specificity. Need to define assumptions
• Chain of thought -make the model think like an analyst
• Format constraints – specify what want for output
• Prompt compression – use less tokens to say equivalent thing. Drop filler words like please. Use lists instead of sentences. Use a little quality, but worth it if minimal effect on output. Engineering tradeoffs.
• Progressive enhancement – Naked prompt (vagye, add role, add specificity, add chanin of thought, add constraints, add validation

AI as Coach

• Ask AI to improve your prompt; both with why and to rpdouce and improved prompt
• Ask AI to compress to make shorter

More notes

• Build prompt library that works for you – uses Obsidian and in the AI tools themselves (aka skills)
• Measure for your use cases

Advanced Patterns

• Tree of Thought (ToT) – explore multiple analytical approaches simultaneously then evaluate which version reals the most insight. This is why AI goes off for an hour; it is doing this behind the scenes
• Self consistency – try different approaches and then majority vote for accuracy
• ReAct pattern – Iterative reason > Act > Observe loops for multi step investigations

My take

Good start by defining vocabulary/components and good example. I’m really glad he shared the slides. The contrast between the text and background made the examples hard to read so I pulled up the deck on my computer for reading those.