Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll

The 5 Principles of Effective AI Prompting - AI Foundations Day 3

Well done!

You have completed The 5 Principles of Effective AI Prompting - AI Foundations Day 3!

Sign up for Treehouse Back to Library

Principle 2: Specify Format

2:35 with Travis Alstrand

If you don't describe the output, AI will guess, and its guess might be a 500-word essay when you wanted three bullets. Specifying length, format, tone, and audience, using delimiters to separate instructions from content, and saying what TO do instead of what not to.

Vocabulary

  • Delimiter — A clear separator between the instructions and the content in your prompt, so the model never mistakes one for the other. Markdown headers and XML tags are the two common ways to do it.
  • Markdown — A simple plain-text formatting syntax — # for headings, - for bullets, ** for bold. It's how AI tools format their answers, and a compact way to structure your own prompts.
  • XML tags — Angle-bracket labels like and used to fence off sections of a prompt. Especially effective with Claude, and the recommended way to mark anything untrusted.

Related Discussions

Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

Sign up

    Related Discussions

    Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

    Sign up

    And a guess might be a 500-word essay when he pointed three bullet points. 0:00
    Be specific about everything. 0:05
    So instead of, the description should be fairly short, a few sentences only, and 0:07
    not too much more. 0:12
    Go with, use a 3-5 sentence paragraph to describe this product. 0:14
    Instead of, write a poem about AI, use, write a 12-line poem in iambic pentameter 0:20
    about AI's impact on education in the style of Maya Angelou. 0:26

    You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.

    Sign up

      You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

      Sign up