tl;dr:
- Prompt engineering is very much alive.
- “Few-shot prompting” can improve accuracy from 0% to 90%.
- Role prompting (e.g. “You are a math professor. . .”) is largely ineffective.
- Advanced techniques like decomposition and self-criticism unlock better performance.
- Context (“additional information”) is underrated—and massively impactful.
- Real leverage comes from crafting high-performing prompts inside products. These prompts are used at scale, run millions of times, and must be hardened and optimized like production code.
