Part I · Foundations
Chapter 05
Prompting and Instruction Formats
The prompt is the highest-leverage and least-governed object in most AI systems — it determines quality more than model choice, yet usually has no version, no test and no owner.
Deliverable: A versioned prompt registry with typed contracts, regression checks and gated artifacts.
What's inside
9 topics
- 5.1Prompt Fundamentals: Encoding Instructions for LLMs
- 5.2Prompting Types: Zero-Shot, One-Shot, Few-Shot
- 5.3Structured Outputs with Few-Shot Prompting
- 5.4Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning
- 5.5Auto-CoT: Automated Reasoning Prompt Generation
- 5.6Persona-Based Prompting
- 5.7Prompt Serialization: Alpaca, ChatML and INST
- 5.8Versioning, Testing and Regression-Checking Prompts
- 5.9Prompt Injection: First Look at the Threat Model
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A note on this content
The book and its chapters are my personal learning notes — compiled from online research and hands-on practice, with most of the content AI-generated from that research and learning. It is not a peer-reviewed publication, and I make no claim that it is 100% error-free. If you spot a mistake, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing about it — contact me.