Advanced prompt engineering for coding assistance

AI-Assisted Coding for Developers

Francesca Donadoni

AI Curriculum Manager, DataCamp

Chain-of-thought

Chain-of-thought

Chain-of-thought

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1st Chain-of-Thought approach

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<Regular Prompt>

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"Let's think step by step"

Chain-of-thought

CoT forces the model to explicitly compute the intermediate steps
- More accurate response

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Chain-of-thought

☺ Normal Prompt

"Write a Python function that checks if a string is a palindrome"

🤓 CoT Prompt

"Check if a string is a palindrome.

Step 1: Normalize the string (lowercase, remove non-alphanumeric characters).

Step 2: Reverse the cleaned string.

Step 3: Compare the original and reversed versions.

Write a function that implements this logic"

Reasoning models

Perform Chain-of-Thought reasoning by default
Self-verify intermediate steps
Iterate over their own reasoning

System roles

Role definitions have been shown to consistently improve output quality and accuracy

System roles

🎓 Coding Tutor

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"You are a friendly programming tutor. Explain each concept in simple terms, using analogies when helpful. Highlight common mistakes to avoid"

🖥 Senior Software Engineer

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"You are a senior software engineer helping to debug code. First, identify what the code is trying to do. Then, analyze where and why it might be failing"

Let's practice!

AI-Assisted Coding for Developers

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