I cover the use of LLMs in several of the books I have written . This blog post is meant to be common general purpose advice for effectively using AI using four techniques: Use one-shot or few-shot prompting: show the AI what you want with examples. Chain of thought reasoning: LLMs are auto-regressive models so the tokens generated "become part of the prompt," that is, without asking for chain of thought reasoning if the model makes a quick guess at an answer, then that answer drives the remaining token generation process. Assigning a role to the AI assistant: for example "You are a historian who uses web search to verify your analysis of history and current events." Reverse prompting: explicitly tell the AI to ask you questions (important because modern system prompts often coach a model to not do this). One-shot or few-shot prompting As an example, you might want to process input text and save people's email addresses and names in some structured output forma...