Prompting Principles
Prompting principles are the core design principles of effective prompting. They define how to specify intent, provide context, guide the model, validate results, shape outputs, and refine interactions over time.
Like SOLID in software design, these principles are not prompt templates. They are higher-level rules that explain what makes prompts reliable and where prompt design goes wrong.
Objective Framing Principle
Specify the objective and remove degrees of freedom so the model does not resolve ambiguity or underspecification by default.
Information Supply Principle
Supply the information that materially shapes the outcome and avoid information that mainly adds noise.
Method Prescription Principle
Prescribe how the model should proceed — steps, checkpoints, comparisons, intermediate artifacts — so the path to the result is shaped deliberately.
Quality Validation Principle
Make uncertainty visible, expose assumptions, and validate output against correctness and constraints before relying on it.
Output Representation Principle
Make the intended use of the response explicit so the output is an artifact with stable structure and predictable fields, not free-form prose.
Interaction Design Principle
Design the interaction itself - who leads the conversation, what vocabulary governs it, and how prompts are created and refined across turns.
These are the core principles that guide prompt design. They explain how to create prompts that are explicit, grounded, structured, and reliable, and they provide the foundation for the patterns introduced in the book.