Beginner Practice Exercises

Short, fun exercises to practice prompting. Try them and write down what changed.

1. Make it specific:

• Take a vague prompt you used before and add role, one constraint (length or tone), and one short example.
• Example: Vague = “Write a post.” → Specific = “You are a friendly writer. Write a 3-sentence LinkedIn post about remote work that mentions ‘focus’ and ‘asynchronous’.”

2. Format practice:

• Ask for the same content in three forms: (a) 3 bullet points, (b) 50-word paragraph, (c) JSON with keys title and bullets.
• Notice which is easiest to use in code.

3. Few-shot example:

• Give 2 short input/output pairs that show the exact style you want, then ask the model to make a new one.

4. Shorten and tighten:

• If the model is too wordy, ask: “Make this 40 words or less.” Compare results.

5. Find and fix a hallucination:

• Give the model a prompt that produced a wrong fact. Try adding a constraint or asking it to “quote the sentence that is uncertain” and fix the prompt until it stops making up facts.

6. Build a tiny template:

• Create a simple prompt template and save it. Example template:

You are a {role}. {Task}. Constraints: {constraints}. Example: {one short example}.

Keep a tiny log for each exercise: original prompt, what you changed, the model result, and which version you liked best. That log is the fastest way to learn prompting.