State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents

Full talk: 📺 State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents (from Y Combinator Images)

Be Hyper-Specific & Detailed (The “Manager” Approach)

Summary: Treat your LLM like a new employee. Provide very long, detailed prompts that clearly define their role, the task, the desired output, and any constraints.

Example: Parableh’s customer support agent prompt is 6+ pages, meticulously outlining instructions for managing tool calls.

Assign a Clear Role (Persona Prompting)

Summary: Start by telling the LLM who it is (e.g., “You are a manager of a customer service agent,” “You are an expert prompt engineer”). This sets the context, tone, and expected expertise.

Benefit: Helps the LLM adopt the desired style and reasoning for the task.

Outline the Task & Provide a Plan

Summary: Clearly state the LLM’s primary task. Break down complex tasks into a step-by-step plan for the LLM to follow.

Benefit: Improves reliability and makes complex operations more manageable for the LLM.

Structure Your Prompt (and Expected Output)

Summary: Use formatting like Markdown or XML-like tags to structure your instructions and define the expected output format.

Example: Parableh uses XML-like tags like <manager_verify>accept/manager_verify> for structured responses.

Benefit: Makes it easier for the LLM to parse instructions and generate consistent, machine-readable output.

Meta-Prompting (LLM, Improve Thyself!)

Summary: Use an LLM to help you write or refine your prompts. Give it your current prompt, examples of good/bad output, and ask it to “make this prompt better” or critique it.

Benefit: LLMs know “themselves” well and can often suggest effective improvements you might not think of.

Provide Examples (Few-Shot & In-Context Learning)

Summary: For complex tasks or when the LLM needs to follow a specific style or format, include a few high-quality examples of input-output pairs directly in the prompt.

Example: Jazzberry (AI bug finder) feeds hard examples to guide the LLM.

Benefit: Significantly improves the LLM’s ability to understand and replicate desired behavior.

Prompt Folding & Dynamic Generation

Summary: Design prompts that can dynamically generate more specialized sub-prompts based on the context or previous outputs in a multi-stage workflow.

Example: A classifier prompt that, based on a query, generates a more specialized prompt for the next stage.

Benefit: Creates more adaptive and efficient agentic systems.

Implement an “Escape Hatch”

Summary: Instruct the LLM to explicitly state when it doesn’t know the answer or lacks sufficient information, rather than hallucinating or making things up.

Example: “If you do not have enough information to make a determination, say ‘I don’t know’ and ask for clarification.”

Benefit: Reduces incorrect outputs and improves trustworthiness.

Use Debug Info & Thinking Traces

Summary: Ask the LLM to include a section in its output explaining its reasoning or why it made certain choices (“debug info”). Some models (like Gemini 1.5 Pro) also provide “thinking traces.”

Benefit: Provides invaluable insight for debugging and improving prompts.

Evals are Your Crown Jewels

Summary: The prompts are important, but the evaluation suite (the set of test cases to measure prompt quality and performance) is your most valuable IP.

Benefit: Evals are essential for knowing why a prompt works and for iterating effectively.

Consider Model “Personalities” & Distillation

Summary: Different LLMs have different “personalities” (e.g., Claude is often more “human-like,” Llama 4 might need more explicit steering). You can use a larger, more capable model for complex meta-prompting/refinement and then “distill” the resulting optimized prompts for use with smaller, faster, or cheaper models in production.

Benefit: Optimizes for both quality (from larger models) and cost/latency (with smaller models).