Prompt Engineering Best Practices: What is Prompt Chaining? [AI Today Podcast]

To improve the reliability and performance of LLMs, sometimes you need to break large tasks/prompts into sub-tasks. Prompt chaining is when a task is split into sub-tasks with the idea to create a chain of prompt operations. Prompt chaining is useful if the LLM is struggling to complete your larger complex task in one step. In this episode of the AI Today podcast hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer discuss prompt chaining. This is part 2 in our 6 part series on Prompt Engineering Best Practices.

Why do you need to chain the prompts?

In this episode we explain when and why to use prompts. Chaining prompts are great, and is a best practices approach, when you're answering questions from information in a document. It's also good when you want to validate & refine Responses. Or, when you're looking to Simplify Writing long-form content and break the writing process into outlined sections or chapters that the AI can expand upon in sequence. Prompt chaining is also good for providing a stepwise approach to research projects. And, for anything that needs an iterative approach such as iterative data analysis, iterative Approach to Computer programming, and iterative approach to other process-based tasks.

What is the prompt chaining technique?

There are a few different types of chain prompts. We go over Chain-of-thought prompting which is breaking down big tasks. We also discuss Self-consistency and ReAct techniques which is thinking harder and smarter. And, we discuss Flipped Interaction as well as Question Refinement Pattern.

When looking to chain prompts there are some best practices to follow. These best practices include decomposing the task, crafting and testing your prompts, chaining prompts, and evaluate and iterate as needed. Your prompt won't be perfect on the first try. Like we always say: Think Big, Start Small, and Iterate Often.

This is part 2 in our 6 part series on Prompt Engineering Best Practices. Subscribe to AI Today to get notified of upcoming episodes in this series and learn the best practices for prompt engineering from Cognilytica AI thought leaders.

Show Notes:

Free Intro to CPMAI course

CPMAI Certification

Subscribe to Cognilytica newsletter on LinkedIn

Properly Scoping AI Projects [AI Today Podcast]