Prompt Engineering for Beginners
Accessible Slide Content for E-Readers
Kevin Crook
Copyright © 2026 by Kevin Crook (KevinCrook.com). Free to use and adapt with attribution, with full terms at the end of this document.
AI Chatbots use LLMs under the hood.
(For the remainder of this workshop, assume the term AI refers to an AI Chatbot built on top of an LLM.)
What you type to the AI.
What the AI replies.
The back-and-forth conversation, which consists of a series of prompts and responses.
The maximum text the AI can process at once. In very long chats, the oldest parts get dropped.
The skill of writing clear, effective prompts that get much better results from AIs.
Advanced techniques beyond prompting to build systems around the AI. Often requires computer programming and systems engineering skills (another free workshop).
Words or parts of words that AIs read and process.
Example token counts:
Words, sentences, paragraphs are turned into lists of numbers (high-dimensional vectors).
Einstein used and popularized tensors. He compared them to riding a horse instead of walking.
Tensor: A multi-dimensional array of numbers.
High-dimensional vectors are a form of tensor.
Computer graphics rely heavily on tensors, so GPUs (Graphics Processing Units on graphics cards) are excellent at the math AIs need for high-dimensional vectors.
TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) are specialized chips built purely for AI tensor calculations.
AIs are trained on text up until a certain cutoff date and have no built-in knowledge of later events.
Patrick Lewis et al., "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks," 2020
Just like kids learning to read pick up extra story details, AIs trained on massive amounts of text absorb extra information they might never fully forget.
This can lead to unexpected or unwanted associations in responses.
AIs sometimes confidently make up facts that sound real but aren't.
AIs predict plausible-sounding text. They don't look facts up. Gaps in training get filled with convincing guesses.
Always fact check important information.
In very long chats or documents, AIs can ignore or forget information in the middle.
Nan Liu et al., "Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts," 2023
Over a long chat, earlier prompts, responses, files, etc. get diluted or forgotten.
Over a long chat, the AI can drift away from the original task or instructions.
Multi-hop Chain: A relates to B relates to C relates to D…
AI's reasoning gets worse with each hop in the chain away from the original information.
Today's AIs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) are built on Transformers, which re-read the whole chat for every word they write.
State Space Models (SSMs) instead keep a running summary as they read.
Hybrids combine both:
NVIDIA's Nemotron models are free to download and run on your own high end hardware (self-hosted).
Albert Gu and Tri Dao, "Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces," 2023
Don't try to write the perfect prompt on the first try.
Trial and error is normal and expected.
Begin with a basic prompt, then refine it step by step.
Major prompt engineering contest winners and top finishers use this technique.
Most important takeaway from this workshop!
Sheila Teo, "How I Won Singapore's GPT-4 Prompt Engineering Competition," 2023
Think of AI as your personal expert prompt engineer.
AI can do prompt engineering better than most humans can (maybe all?).
Use 2 chats:
Role: Assign the AI a specific role or expertise.
("You are an experienced travel agent...")
Context: Background info the AI needs.
Objective: Exactly what you want done.
Style: Writing style you want.
(formal report, casual, technical, etc.)
Tone: The attitude of the response.
(friendly, professional, persuasive, etc.)
Audience: Who the response is for.
(beginners, experts, kids, your boss, etc.)
Response Format: How to deliver the answer.
(bullet list, table, paragraph, long form, with examples, etc.)
AIs learn from whatever you put in the context window with no retraining needed.
File Uploads and Projects are great examples: Your documents become knowledge the AI can use.
Meta-prompting works here too:
Ask the AI to help generate the context material itself (summaries, examples, background docs).
Tom Brown et al., "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," 2020
Periodically ask the LLM to summarize the conversation so far. This keeps both of you focused.
At the first signs of context rot or task rot, cut your losses! Ask for a summary, start a fresh new chat, and paste it in.
For large documents or long contexts:
For complex tasks, add this to your prompt:
"Explain your reasoning step by step."
You'll get noticeably better answers, and you can check the reasoning yourself.
Jason Wei et al., "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models," 2022
LLM vendors offer multiple versions (fast, deep, beta, etc.).
There are multiple vendors to choose from (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etc.).
Stuck or unsatisfied? The same prompt can get very different results elsewhere.
Save your best prompts in a document as you go for easy reuse and adaptation or search for public "prompt libraries" for great starting points.
Share useful chats using the LLM's share link.
Great for showing coworkers, family, or friends exactly how you got a result, prompts and all.
Create emails, essays, cover letters, social media posts, stories, poems, scripts, etc.
Edit, improve, or polish your writing (clarity, grammar, tone, professionalism).
Condense long articles, books, meetings, or videos into key points.
Break down complex topics in simple terms (great for school, homework, or learning anything new).
Get clear answers, comparisons, or background information on almost any topic.
Generate creative ideas, solutions, or options for school projects, problems, or life.
Create travel plans, meal plans, workout schedules, project timelines, or to-do lists.
Weigh pros and cons, compare options, and get recommendations for life choices.
Get personalized explanations, practice questions, study help, or test prep.
Translate text, documents, and conversations between languages.
Act as a tutor, coach, mock interviewer, career advisor, or expert in any field.
Generate ideas and content for art, images, music, videos, and creative projects.
Explain, write, and/or debug code.
Upload your own files and ask questions about them (contracts, manuals, reports, medical paperwork).
Citations appear on slides where a specific person, their work, or a term they coined is used.
Where an idea has no clear original source and is widely discussed, no citation is given.
The following documents for this module provide further references for those topics:
Copyright © 2026 by Kevin Crook (KevinCrook.com)
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AI was used to help prepare this content. All of it was reviewed and edited by the author.
I am a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. This document reflects my own views and opinions, which are not necessarily those of UC Berkeley.