Step-back prompting
Step-back prompting is asking a model to state the general principle behind a question before answering the specific question.
Establishing the governing rule first tends to produce more accurate specifics, because the answer is then derived from a stated principle rather than recalled directly. It is most useful on technical and scientific questions where the model might otherwise pattern-match to a superficially similar case.
Related terms
- Chain-of-thought prompting
- Chain-of-thought prompting is instructing a model to work through its reasoning step by step before giving an answer, rather than answering immediately.
- Prompt decomposition
- Prompt decomposition is breaking one complex request into a sequence of smaller prompts, each handling a single step and feeding the next.
More on techniques
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.