You often read that prompt engineering is dead, killed by models that ‘understand everything.’ The reality on the ground is the opposite: as use cases grow more complex (agents, RAG, multi-turn), the prompt becomes code again. It gets versioned, tested, optimized.
Three Rules Before Techniques
- 1
Evaluate Before Optimizing
Without an evaluation dataset (10-50 examples with expected output), you’re flying blind. It’s the only way to know if a change actually improves things.
- 2
Small Before Large
Break it down. A prompt that does 4 things badly beats 4 prompts that do 1 thing well. Chaining almost always beats complexification.
- 3
Measure the Right Metric
Accuracy, latency, cost, robustness to hostile inputs: decide what matters before optimizing. The best technique changes by objective.
The 10 Techniques in Detail
Structured Chain-of-Thought
Explicitly ask to ‘break down into numbered steps before answering.’ On 2026 models without reasoning mode, it’s still a net reliability gain.
Don't answer right away. (1) List hypotheses. (2) Evaluate each. (3) Compare. (4) Conclude.