You Probably Don’t Need Prompt Engineering!

so I keep getting this question over and over again igore is it worth to even learn prompt Engineering in 2024 and I get it I think it's a very relevant question but the answer really depends on what you're trying to accomplish I'm going to try to break it down in this video and not just that I'm going to give you a tool that will solve many if not most of your prompt engineering struggles but more importantly I'm going to clarify why you might not even need that tool all these fancy prompt engineering tricks so let's get into it I think this is going to be a Super Value packed video and I think you might be pleasantly surprised by my breakdown of if you even need prompt engineering these days so let's start by

establishing what prompt engineering even means there's many definitions floating around but I like to see it as getting the best results out of tools like chat GPT I think that's what most people mean when they say prompt engineering it's interacting with llms like cat GPT CLA Gemini lree Etc to get the best possible results out of it for themselves this is what most people mean sure there's prompt Engineering in the context of image generation but that's a different topic and usually when people bring this up they mean chat interaction that's why we'll be focusing on that today so why is this called prompt engineering and not using chat GPT well because the main interface with chat GPT is prompts it's natural language it's set up for humans we can speak to it in the same language that me and you both use to communicate in our everyday lives and then prompt engineering is manipulating that language and being aware of various tips and tricks and phrases that then improve the results or unlock entirely new ability all together but it's interesting because if we look at the example of chat GPT so many tools have been added into it that getting the most out of it goes beyond just knowing what to type into that little chat box you have image generation you have data analysis you can store things into memory you have gpts with external knowledge bases and actions that can do things by connecting to external apis this goes beyond just telling it the right words to get better outputs and over time my personal definition when I answer these questions is really all of this it's a holistic look at chat GPT all the tools and capabil ities combined because for example to use the data analysis tool well you need to be aware of the different capabilities of the different types of graphs it can produce for you and then you can prompt it to do that which brings it back to prompt engineering that's why I'm saying I include this in my definition so now that at least for the context of this video we established our definition do

you need prompt Engineering in 2024 and the answer is it depends on what you're trying to do I would break this down into two categories okay we'll keep it simple here the first category is you're interacting with ch GPT yourself you're sitting there you're typing things in you're getting results and you have the ability to go back and forth just like you would with a human assistant now for most everyday users for most consumers this is the main use case you sit here you open a new chat and you start typing requests and then you get results you look at them and you follow up with more messages and in this use case where you're there to do the quality control to follow up to include other things I think most people don't need prompt engineering a basic education is extremely valuable being aware of all the different toolings being aware of some of the different prompting tricks or some of the hidden abilities like for example the ability to generate Interactive quizzes or knowing that you can just throw Excel sheet at it and also chat with that and this is what I've been pushing on this YouTube right I've been educating you around the tooling about different prompting tricks but at the end of the day if I want to write an essay I don't think most people need Super prompts in their everyday usage and some of the most advanced chat GPT users I know use it like this and so do I myself I have a prompt database with a lot of specialty prompts but I don't even use it on everyday basis if I need something I just tell it but having spent quite a bit of time I have kind of a backlog of different functionalities and prompts in my head that can kind of access so in these everyday scenarios where you dare to interact with it I would say that beyond the basic education you don't need prompt engineering you just need intuition and certain quality standards that you will uphold chat GPT to because when you review the results that's where the next prompt kind of comes from if you're missing something tell it and this is why I always teach chat chi in a way where I tell people to start by thinking of it as a very highly paid assistant if you hire an assistant for yourself you have certain expectations and if the results are not on par with what you expect you'll tell him or and then when you get the revision you'll feedback it again and this is the usage that even Advanced users kind of arrived at over the past few years and this keeps resurfacing in conversations matter of fact recently I talked to kave Lopez from magnifica you might know them they have probably the best image upscaler on the market and I say that objectively I said that before and he came into the I Advantage community and he shared his story with us and in the end we had a little Q& A with the community and one of the questions that came up was how do you prompt these days and this was his answer I wasn't like you are an expert in whatever you want to exper in pami how SK no I'm pretty straightforward maybe I think I'm leaving in the future and maybe it will be better to be more specific or more using PR Liberties or whatever maybe and this is my point if you have a certain level of experience most of the time you'll be fine by intuitively using chat GPT because you have the ability to go back and forth and feedback with 32,000 tokens of context available within this interface now that's enough for long conversations so you can do this iterative feedback process but again that's where the base knowledge of cat GPT comes in you need to know what tokens are a context limit is by the way if you want to learn more about this I created a deep dive lecture on it that I made publicly available in the public area of the a Advantage Community you can check out a link in the description below but it's basically a 1-hour lecture only focusing on token limits as this is one of the essential things you need to learn about when you start out with chat GPT so that is the everyday usage for most users that is also relevant right and I just kind of stated you don't really need prompt engineering while having a prompt engineering course and this channel being mostly focused on prompt engineering why do I even bother then well that's because there is a second bucket of usage that is very different and I say bucket because it includes multiple scenarios it's basically every scenario where you're not there yourself to review the answers and to apply what you know to the conversations this includes but isn't limited to creating prompts for other people maybe you're an entrepreneur and you want to equip your employees with various prompts if this is the case it won't be there to follow up and to massage and all the little edits you kind of want to get it right in the first prompt and in this concrete example it might make a lot of sense to build something like a gbd to give them a simple user interface with presets and a communication sequence that is preset we've talked about this before there's many guys on my Channel about this but that's not where the second category ends because there's other scenarios where you absolutely do need prompt engineering and that is when you're dealing with automations if you automate something by definition there's not going to be this human touch point this review process and that automation which includes a prompt is going to run dozens maybe even hundreds of times and there's no one there to double check the results in this case you do want prompt engineer you do want to flash out the context and Define all the little variables that might cause alterations in your results you want to make it consistent right and that's why I put this in one bucket because just like with the entrepreneur crafting prompts for the employee you want consistency and reliability and when this is important prompt engineering is hyper relevant and there's also this third scenario which belongs in this bucket which is when you have a use case that you use over and over again maybe a prompt that you use once every week this is where you also want to flesh it out because you want consistent results every single time every time we're consistency and predictability is Paramount engineering your prompts and putting in the extra time to flesh out all the context is probably a good idea okay so now we establish these two

buckets right one where you interact with it and you can feedback and one where you won't get to feedback the results so what to do about the first one we covered already right most of the channel is about that it's being aware of different prompting techniques and gaining a basic education on what tools exist and what they can do but for the second bucket you really do want to get into more intricate techniques this is where super prompts come in this is where fleshing out the on line prompt into something that spans across the entire A4 page is probably a good idea but how do you do this because this is a skill that is not that easily taught it's not something you can learn in two free YouTube videos and no this is not going to be a sales pitch for another course or something because even experien prompt Engineers that do this as their full-time job need a lot of time to extend these prompts and to flesh out all of the context but I think we found a solution that will solve 80% of these issues for most people and we've been working on this solution for months and about to give it to you for free this solution has been co-developed between RIS duava a Czech prompt engineer that I actually met early 2023 in the AI Advantage Discord community that morphed into the AI Advantage Community today but RIS slow basically came along and we started collaborating on a lot of projects and exchanging thoughts and over the course of the last year he actually quit his last career and he became a full-time prompt Engineering in prag Czech Republic and he has been crafting these intricate prompts on an everyday basis for his company and the clients of his companies and as rasis has been developing this he has been Consulting with me on a regular basis on how to lay this out so it's usable for you and with the add Vantage Community we've been testing and iterating on this since a while the result a brand new AI Advantage GPT Named Sam The Prompt Creator what does it do it takes a problem you might have and it generates a complex prompt with all the context fleshed out in other words it's a really effective prompt generator and we also built a function in where you can put in your existing prompts and it turns them into this more advanced version for you that's this improve button so I'm going to guide you through this I'm going to show you how to use this here and again this is mostly relevant if you're in the second bucket if you're automating delegating or if youing using a prompt a lot if you just want to get something done in chat GPT you might not need this but follow along as I show you this and make up your own mind before we get into functionality just want to address the name it's sort of a tributes to the head of open ey s mman is helping us get things done on a daily basis with chat GPT and S The Prompt Creator is helping you to build prompts that just work so how does this work how does it generate prompts for you well two ways really one is the quick build this is optimized to get your result as quickly as possible if I click this and a new version might look differently we're iterating on this on a daily basis but basically tells you it's here to build a prompt for you directly and you can just tell it what you want to do here and all I need to do here is State what kind of prompt I want to build so let's just take one of the classic prompt examples that a lot of people use email reply drafts I want to draft email replies to my marketing agency building our websites and you can even go shorter if you want let me tell you doing a proper sentence like this that gives it a little bit of details is helpful cuz then it will know more about what to build you if you want to make it as good as possible that's a second mode that we'll look at in a second but right here I'll just hit enter and there it goes it just does its thing it writes the entire prompt for you in a markdown format that you can copy with the click of a button and you're basically good to go and look the point of this video is not breaking down all of the prompt engineering and the techniques that I used within here and within the GPT and that's what we do in the community we're holding a focus session we're going to break down the build and the prompting behind this entire GPT in depth all you have to know is that you can copy this open a new chat and then run the prompt only thing that you might want to customize is the free shot template here in the end where you can insert multiple examples of how you want that email to look The Prompt Creator knows that it really helps if you do this that's why it gives you this template but you can feel free to delete this or insert examples here in between the lines everything else is set up for you and as mentioned it flashed out all the context that might not be obvious at First Sight but if you're going to be doing this over and over again if you have an automation that will be drafting email replies you want to specify things like the task description in more detail with some extra context what are the action steps that you're going to be taking how are we going to be addressing issue resolution if this occurs when you're working with agency there's probably going to be a lot of back and forth and your ideas clashing with their implementation and your vision being different from their Vision we built this to understand a lot of these nuances of various use cases and includes the solutions to them into the prompt for you don't have to think about it specifies goals outcome expectations and it adds a block with essential and important guidelines and this is one example and it took no time you can go ahead and build prompts for yourself at no cost with this GPT we have and in the second mode it will help build your prompt with more in-depth information so if you have 3 to 5 minutes to answer some more detail questions this interactive questionnaire that we prepared in here for you will guide you with questions that help you Zone in on what you really need from that prompt so if I'm doing something for educators I'll just say B and all I'll do is follow this interactive quiz and in the end it will generate the prompt that will solve my issue for me in the second step I do the same thing I did with the quick build going to take a different route say I want to create interactive quizzes for my prompt engineering students and then as you can see more multiple choice questions that become more and more focused on your use case I will just fast forward to all the sections and then we can look at the result there you go after going through all the nine sections it crafts this prompt for me that now is obviously way more dialed in than the quick build and then last but definitely not least it's the prompt Improvement where it goes ahead and asks for the prompt you already have and it fleshes out the various pieces of context for you I'll take this organizational prompt that we featured in our recent newsletter paste it in here and again in just one interaction it does its thing and improves The Prompt for you now as you can see here I use the prompt formula with square brackets where you need to change specific variables I'm just going to share the Prompt in here and I get the improved result two notes on this firstly and importantly you want to use finished prompts you don't want to use formulas so if there's any undefined variables square brackets curly brackets anything that is not final this will not work consistently and you might run into troubles so always use prompts that are specific where it does not include certain parts that are yet to be defined secondly C GPT and especially gpts have massive limitations we did our best but if something doesn't work as expected simply run it again eight out of 10 times things work as expected but if you run into any sort of troubles and maybe you're getting unexpected results just go ahead and rerun The Prompt and give it another chance ah and good that I did that now we're getting an unexpected result so instead of being confused by it I'll just run it again actually I'll add a little block here saying here's my prompt word of warning we just release this we'll be iterating on it so if you run into any hiccups just run it again and we'll be implementing improvements over time and that's really it so if you're getting something done yourself just quickly prompted but if you want more consistency quality and detail then you can use Sam The Prompt Creator to either build up The Prompt quickly build it more in depth by answering a series of questions or you can simply upgrade the prompts you have and that'll work more consistently over time and this goes for all models open a andic Google meta doesn't matter giving it more context will improve output quality and increase consistency so in conclusion no prompt engineering is not irrelevant there's just situations where that might be the case and a lot of the applications that are being built are going in a direction where they're trying to reduce friction with the users they don't want to type in custom prompts and if they know what they're doing they'll be doing something very similar to what I show you here today they'll be flashing out the context so they get consistent results from the application that you're using and the users are only going to see a nice button just like apple announced with their implementations right you just say shorten text you don't have to prompt it and tell it what shorten means and you don't have to bother with fleshing out all the context around what a good short text looks like they'll do that for you but s The Prompt Creator can also do that for you but you retain a lot of the manual control all the links are in the description a big thank you and shout out to rasa again for co-creating this with me and the Advantage Community you can also find his LinkedIn Below in the description and with that being said good luck out there using these large language models and I'll see you in the next one