Chapter 18

18Prompting and System Prompts

Draft pending — this page is an outline of planned content. Write it by creating content/prompting.md.

18.1The system prompt as configuration

Planned: How a provider sets persona, rules, and defaults; the layering of system/developer/user roles.

18.2In-context learning

Planned: Zero-, few-shot, and why examples work without weight updates.

18.3Chain-of-thought and its descendants

Planned: Eliciting reasoning; when it helps and when it is theater.

18.4Prompt injection and the trust boundary

Planned: Why everything from tools and the web is untrusted data, not instructions.