In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris provide a practical guide to prompt engineering, prompt engineering 101. Learn how to approach prompt creation like software development, starting with thorough requirements gathering using the 5 P’s framework. Discover the power of the RACE framework (Role, Action, Context, Execute) for crafting effective prompts that produce high-quality outputs. Finally, understand the importance of incorporating feedback and refining your prompts over time to improve accuracy and efficiency.

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What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, let’s talk about prompt engineering 101, but from a different perspective.

We’ve talked about prompt engineering a ton in terms of writing prompts and what it is, etcetera.

This week, as part of this four-part series, let’s talk about prompt engineering in the context of proper software development and the 101 of how you do that.

I pretty much assume we don’t need to talk about why prompt engineering is important.

ChatGPT has taken care of that for us, and we’ve talked about many of our different frameworks for doing it.

But to start off, Katie, when you’re talking about good software development—because prompt engineering is writing code, you are writing code, you just happen to be writing code in English, or in Danish, or Japanese, and not in Python, or Java, or C++—when you’re doing good software engineering, where do you start to ensure that you get a good result out of your software development exercises, whether it’s a little script or a big one?

Do you want to hear the shocking answer?

I’m sure I’m going to be stunned.

I’m going to guess it’s going to start with something like, I don’t know, requirements gathering?

You would be 100% correct.

Software development is one of those practices that people love to hate, and they hate to love, because developers—in broad strokes—developers don’t like to do documentation, they just want to write code, they just want to make things.

But good software development needs to have a set of requirements, and the requirements don’t have to be cumbersome.