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Chatgpt Prompting Essentials Textbook

A free, self-paced textbook in 6 chapters. Read a chapter, then drill it with the 201 companion flashcards using spaced repetition.

6 chapters · 201 cards · Updated

Chapters

  1. 1Foundations of Prompting

    A prompt is the natural-language input—a question, instruction, or block of context—that a user provides to a language model to elicit a response. Prompts frame the task and guide...

  2. 2Prompting Patterns and Techniques

    Prompts can be designed with several reusable patterns. The role pattern assigns the model a persona or function, conditioning its tone, vocabulary, and reasoning style for a speci...

  3. 3Sampling, Decoding, and API Controls

    Several API-level parameters shape how the model converts probabilities into text. Temperature scales the logits before sampling: zero makes the model greedy and deterministic, pic...

  4. 4Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Grounding

    Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pairs a retriever that fetches relevant external documents with a generator LLM that conditions its answer on those documents. RAG reduces hall...

  5. 5Agents, Tools, and Program-Aided Reasoning

    Function calling lets a model output structured arguments matching a user-defined schema, which the application then executes against real APIs, databases, or code, returning resul...

  6. 6Safety, Reliability, and Evaluation

    A hallucination is a fluent, plausible-sounding model statement that is factually incorrect, fabricated, or unsupported. Intrinsic hallucinations contradict the source prompt or co...

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