Prompt Engineering for Agentic Workflows
Chapter 1: Foundations of Agentic AI Systems
Defining Agentic Workflows
Core Components of AI Agents
The Function of Prompt Engineering in Agentic Systems
Contrasting Agent Prompts with Standard Prompts
Overview of Agent Architectures
Methods for Assessing Agent Performance
Hands-on: Analyzing a Simple Agent's Task Execution
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Advanced Prompting for Agent Control
Structuring Prompts for Sequential Operations
Refining Instructions for Complex Agent Actions
Assigning Roles and Personas to Agents
Utilizing Few-Shot Examples for Agent Guidance
Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought in Agent Prompts
Controlling Agent State via Prompt Design
Prompting for Self-Correction and Error Handling
Practice: Crafting Prompts for Coherent Agent Behavior
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Prompt Engineering for Tool Use
Principles of Tool-Augmented Language Models
Prompting Agents for Tool Selection and Operation
Formatting Tool Specifications for LLM Comprehension
Managing Tool Inputs and Outputs through Prompts
Prompts for Interacting with APIs
Addressing Errors During Tool Execution via Prompts
Designing Prompts for Novel Tool Integration
Hands-on: Guiding an Agent to Use a Web Search Tool
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Prompts for Agent Planning and Task Management
Introduction to AI Planning in Agent Systems
Prompting for Goal Specification and Refinement
Breaking Down Complex Problems using Prompts
Incorporating Constraints and Preferences in Agent Plans
Iterative Planning and Re-planning with Prompt Adjustments
Prompt Strategies for Hierarchical Task Decomposition
Evaluating Plan Viability and Quality
Practice: Prompting an Agent to Formulate a Detailed Plan
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Managing Agent Memory with Prompts
The Significance of Memory in Agent Operations
Prompt Strategies for Short-Term Memory and Context Windows
Information Condensation Techniques for Prompts
Prompting for Long-Term Information Retrieval
Structuring Prompts for Accessing Knowledge Stores
Managing Information Consistency and Beliefs
Maintaining Task Focus Across Extended Interactions
Hands-on: Prompting an Agent with Dynamic Information Streams
Quiz for Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Debugging and Optimizing Prompts in Agentic Systems
Common Issues in Agent Prompt Implementations
A Systematic Approach to Prompt Iteration and Testing
Effects of Prompt Chaining on Agent Outputs
Methods for Analyzing Agent Action Sequences
Comparing Prompt Variations for Agent Effectiveness
Logging and Monitoring for Prompt Improvement
Organizing and Versioning Prompts for Agents
Hands-on: Refining Prompts to Resolve an Agent Workflow Issue
Quiz for Chapter 6
Prompt Strategies for Short-Term Memory and Context Windows
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- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 - Foundational paper introducing the Transformer architecture, which forms the basis for current large language models and their context window mechanism.
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models, Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, Denny Zhou, 2022 arXiv (arXiv) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2201.11903 - Introduces Chain-of-Thought prompting, a method directly relevant to the scratchpad technique for enhancing model reasoning and intermediate thought tracking within the context window.
- Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts, Nelson F. Liu, Kevin Lin, John Hewitt, Ashwin Paranjape, Michele Bevilacqua, Fabio Petroni, Percy Liang, 2023 Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2307.03172 - Research exploring how large language models process information across long contexts, detailing phenomena such as primacy and recency effects that influence strategic information placement in prompts.
- ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models, Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, Yuan Cao, 2023 arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03629 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2210.03629 - Presents ReAct, an agentic framework combining reasoning and acting through a structured scratchpad approach, demonstrating effective context management for multi-step agent tasks.
- Prompt Engineering Guide, Anthropic, 2024 (Anthropic) - Official guide offering practical strategies and best practices for prompt engineering with large language models, including advice on managing context, structuring prompts, and token awareness.