We’re an AI engineering studio working on our own products, sharing what we’re learning in educational courses and training. We’ve been prompt engineering since the GPT-3 beta in 2020, and we spend all our time experimenting with the latest AI tools and techniques.
Prompt Engineering Book
Here’s what people are saying:
“The absolute best book-length resource I’ve read on prompt engineering. Mike and James are masters of their craft.”
– Dan Shipper, Cofounder & CEO, Every
“If you’re looking to improve the accuracy and reliability of your AI systems, this book should be on your shelf.”
– Mayo Oshin, Founder & CEO, Siennai Analytics, early LangChain contributor
What is this book about?:
Everything changes so quickly in AI, so we wanted to define a set of principles that are transferrable across models and modalities. The Five Principles of Prompting form the foundation for this book, and they’re based on what worked for us with GPT-3, still works for us with GPT-4 and therefore will continue to work with GPT-5, or whatever model we use in the future.
- Give Direction: Describe the desired style in detail, or reference a relevant persona.
- Specify Format: Define what rules to follow, and the required structure of the response.
- Provide Examples: Insert a diverse set of test cases where the task was done correctly.
- Evaluate Quality: Identify errors and rate responses, testing what drives performance.
- Divide Labor: Split tasks into multiple steps, chained together for complex goals.
The book is ten chapters long, covering both text and image prompting, as well as using Python to build AI automation scripts and products. This isn’t a list of prompting hacks to find the right combination of magic words, it’s a practical guide for building systems that provide the right context to AI applications, as well as how to test and scale AI systems for production.
The book will be useful for you if:
- Your time is worth more than $40 an hour, and saving a few hours reading this book instead of piecing everything together from multiple sources is worth it to you.
- You’re not just using AI casually but you’re actually building an AI application or internal template many people will use hundreds or thousands of times a day.
- You want tips for reducing hallucination and improving the reliability of AI, while learning from 100s of real-world examples of how to solve common issues working with AI.
- You’d like to compare the strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI vs other models, as well as common frameworks like LangChain, different vector database options, and AUTOMATIC1111
- You want to see what it looks like to build an end-to-end AI application, from a naive prompt to a full AI agent, including building a basic user interface with Gradio
Our latest projects
- Prompt Engineering for Generative AI book with O’Reilly (June 2024 release)
- Using AI vision to watch 100s of hours of video to get clips for UGC game ads
- Prompt Engineering Principles: ChatGPT & DALL-E course on Udemy (non-technical & free)
- The Complete Prompt Engineering for AI Bootcamp course on Udemy (70,000 students!)
- Vexpower AI for growth marketing courses, available via subscription
We’re always interested in hearing about difficult problems or interesting insights related to generative AI and prompt engineering, so reach out to us on Twitter:
- Mike @hammer_mt
- James @jamesphoenix12
About the founders
Mike Taylor co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder, working with clients such as Booking.com, Monzo Bank, and Time Out. Over 400,000 people have taken his marketing courses on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and Vexpower, and he co-authored a book for O’Reilly on prompt engineering. He also also written for Reforge, Every, and Lenny’s Newsletter.
James Phoenix builds reliable data pipelines for marketing teams, automating thousands of recurring tasks. He has taught 50+ Data Science bootcamps for General Assembly, and partnered with Mike on the Udemy course, and Vexpower, as well as the O’Reilly book on prompt engineering.