Where to find the best GPT Prompts

If you’ve read the The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, you know that if you want a good answer you need to ask a good question.

Prompt engineering will get easier with each new model drop, but I don’t think it will go away entirely. Knowing how to ask an effective question is always be useful. Even if you’re talking to a superintelligence.

With that said, this week I’ve curated a list of lists for you — curations of GPT & ChatGPT prompts.

Beyond just learning how to write prompts, a few observations emerge when scanning the collections as a group:

• Chat-style prompts and transactional prompts are very different. Chat style prompts set the stage (“I want you to act as my financial advisor”) whereas transactional prompts attempt to extract specific information. Take a look at the difference between awesome-chatgpt-prompts and semiosis/prompts as an example of these two styles.

• Transactional prompts require a lot more work since there’s a much narrower band of acceptable output, both syntactically and semantically.

• Some of these prompts (specifically those in PromptDirectory) are so transactional that they make me wonder if LLM API companies will enable “push/pop” style attention stacks for bot builders, in which I can add a prompt to my current context, use it until it’s no longer necessary, and then pop it from my attention stack.

With those high-level thoughts in mind, I hope you enjoy browsing this week’s links:

OpenAI Cookbook
OpenAI’s standard reference book. Sticks mostly to the basic archetypical GPT use cases, letting you add the longer-tail customizations. Notable in the riches of code examples it contains beyond mere prompts.

PromptDirectory by @AndrewMayne
Searchable index of prompts by intent. What I love about this is how low-level and transactional many of these intents are — I can imagine something like this becoming an subroutine library automatically applied by a chatbot when it detects a user’s intent.

ChatGPT-Prompts by yokoffing
A small collection of prompts focused on longer discourse generation: essays, plays, dialogues, and poems.

awesome-chatgpt-prompts by @fkadev
Large collection of task-specific prompts, some parameterized by multiple inputs. Tuned very much to be the opening prompt in a ChatGPT-style session.

semiosis/prompts by @mullikine
Large collection of prompts expressed as YAML files complete with full LLM parameterization and pre & post-processing. If you’re a developer you can spend hours browsing this for tricks and ideas beyond just the prompt text.

Clever Prompts by @algowriting
Google spreadsheet curating prompt examples from around the web. What I love about this is that it curates together many prompts that otherwise might have been lost to the wind.

OpenPrompts by @OnlineBabylon
Website providing faceted browsing of prompts by intent and topic. With more data and a bit more nuance to the facets, something like is bound to become a de facto reference guide.

That’s it for this week!

Have a request for a theme or tips on a great project to check out? Let me know!

Shipped with AI is brought to you by Steamship, a package manager for hosted AI apps.