Your AI Prompting Cheat Codes: A Curation of the Best Prompting Resources and Prompt Libraries Available

Ready Player 1?

Anyone remember buying gamer guides or watching YouTube videos on how to level up in your favorite games? Oh wait, just me? If so, this is a throwback to those old tutorial guides to help you quickly level up your AI prompting game with the best resources available today. Consider this your gamer guide or cheat codes to better prompting and prompt templates. Now it's time to grab that star power y'all! ⭐

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's ChatGPT is revolutionizing how we work, create, and communicate. Whether you're a solopreneur juggling multiple roles, an influencer looking to scale engagement, or a corporate team aiming for greater efficiency, AI can be a powerful partner. But there's a catch: the quality of output you get from an LLM is directly tied to the quality of your input, the prompt.

This cheat sheet is designed to guide you through the best prompting resources and libraries available. I'll help you find the tools to inspire you to infuse AI into your workflows, making you more efficient and effective, no matter your starting skill level.

Why Well-Crafted Prompts Are Your Key to AI Success

I have covered this in previous blogs, but basic prompting of an LLM usually provides bland, generic, or "meh" responses. LLMs, when not skillfully guided, have an inherent tendency to produce "mean" or average outputs, reflecting common patterns from their vast training data. I covered this in a previous article called the "LLMs: The Great Mean Reverters".

Effective prompt engineering, which involves being clear, providing context, assigning a role to the AI, and refining your requests, is the critical skill to overcome this. It allows you to elicit "amazing responses" that are specific, insightful, and highly relevant to your goals. This guide will point you to resources that teach you these skills and provide ready-to-use prompts.

Getting Started: Official Resources from LLM Developers

Most of the frontier LLM providers should be your first stop for understanding how to communicate effectively with their AI. They provide foundational knowledge, best practices and templates to help you get started.

Google Gemini:

• Guides & Best Practices: Google emphasizes using natural language, being clear and concise, providing context, and breaking down complex tasks. Their prompting strategies detail using clear instructions, examples (few-shot prompting), and defining the desired output format. You can also find guidance for Google Workspace with Gemini.

• Prompt Gallery: Google AI Studio includes a prompt gallery, and you can find examples within Google Workspace documentation.

• Nonprofit Prompt Library: While tailored for nonprofits, this library contains many adaptable prompts for operational efficiency, content creation, and outreach that can be useful for anyone.

  
  

Anthropic Claude:

• Guides & Best Practices: Anthropic stresses the power of assigning a role to Claude (role prompting using system prompts), providing context (like the intended audience or task purpose), and chaining prompts for complex requests.

• Official Prompt Library: Anthropic offers an official library with prompts for various work and play scenarios, such as the "Corporate clairvoyant" for distilling reports or "Meeting scribe" for summaries.

• Prompt Improver: A handy tool in the Anthropic Console that helps refine your prompts, especially for complex tasks needing high accuracy.

OpenAI ChatGPT:

• Guides & Best Practices: OpenAI consistently highlights being specific, descriptive, and detailed about context, desired outcome, length, format, and style. They recommend putting instructions at the beginning of prompts and using examples to clarify your needs. Iterative refinement and requesting specific tones are also key. See their API best practices and ChatGPT best practices.

• Community Resources: While OpenAI provides extensive best practice guides filled with examples, the community has also stepped up. A detailed prompting guide shared on Reddit, for instance, offers a structured approach including role, instructions, and output format.

Tapping into the Community: A Goldmine of Shared Wisdom

Beyond official documentation, a vibrant ecosystem of community-driven resources offers a vast and rapidly evolving array of prompts for countless applications.

Reddit:

• Key Subreddits: Communities like r/ChatGPTPro (for advanced discussions), r/PromptEngineering (for general techniques and libraries), r/SideProject (for solopreneur applications), and r/Productivitycafe (for creator and freelancer prompts) are invaluable.

• What You'll Find: User-generated prompts, discussions on effective prompt structuring, examples for business operations, content creation, marketing, and curated lists. You can even find discussions about prompt marketplaces.

  
  

GitHub:

• "Awesome" Lists: GitHub is home to numerous "Awesome" lists that curate prompts. Look for repositories like "awesome-chatgpt-content-creation-prompts" (for blog and social media content), "Awesome-ChatGPT-Prompts-for-Productivity" (covering task management, email drafting), "awesome-claude-prompts" (a wide range for Claude), and "awesome-gemini-prompts" (for summarization, coding, and email with Gemini).

• What You'll Find: Categorized lists of prompts, often with placeholders for your specific data, serving as excellent starting points and inspiration.

  
  

Substack:

• Newsletters & Blogs: Several Substack publications are dedicated to prompt engineering and AI applications. "The Prompt Engineering Substack" and "Engineering Prompts" discuss techniques and tools. Others offer specific prompts for business, content strategy (like Josh Spector's "3 AI Prompts for Business"), and creating human-sounding AI content (such as Tuhin Patra's "Deep Writing").

• What You'll Find: A mix of theory, practical advice, prompt examples, and strategies for integrating AI, particularly for content creators and solopreneurs.

HuggingFace:

• Datasets as Prompt Mines: HuggingFace hosts datasets that can be a source of prompt examples, even if primarily intended for research. The "lucadillenburg/startup-chatbot" dataset, for example, is rich with prompts relevant to business creation, market research, and customer acquisition, making it great for solopreneurs and B2B contexts.

• What You'll Find: Insights into how questions are phrased for AI and the types of responses generated for business planning and strategy.

Other Notable Forums and Marketplaces:

• Platforms: Notion Template Marketplaces, Gumroad, and sites like GodofPrompt.ai offer free and paid collections of prompts.

• What You'll Find: These are often targeted at solopreneurs and freelancers, with prompt packs like "75 Ultimate Chat GPT Prompts For Solopreneurs" (Notion version) or its Gumroad version, and the "1500+ ChatGPT Prompts For Solopreneurs" (Notion version) or its Gumroad version covering automation, content creation, marketing, and sales.

Prompts Tailored for Your Success

My clients usually work in B2B Tech, or as Solopreneurs and Influencers, but these prompting resources can really be used in any industry. My clients apply these resources in the following ways:

B2B Employees: Find prompts to enhance operational efficiency, generate professional and concise outputs, transform unstructured data into actionable intelligence, and maintain a professional tone in communications.

Solopreneurs: Leverage LLMs as a "force multiplier". Discover prompts for task management, client communication templates, blog ideation, social media campaigns, and defining your brand voice to overcome strategic paralysis and automate tasks.

Influencers: Boost creativity and engagement with prompts for viral content ideas, scriptwriting, caption generation, and audience interaction. Crucially, learn to infuse your unique voice to maintain authenticity while scaling your content and exploring monetization.

Quick Tips for Using Prompt Libraries Effectively

1. Start with the Source: Begin with official documentation from LLM developers (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI) to grasp core prompting principles.

2. Explore Communities for Specifics: Dive into community platforms like Reddit, GitHub, and Substack for specialized, real-world prompts tailored to niche tasks or industries.

3. Adapt, Don't Just Copy-Paste: Use library prompts as a starting point. The best results come from testing, reviewing, and refining prompts to fit your exact needs and the specific LLM you're using.

4. Remember Core Principles: Always aim for clarity and specificity, provide context, consider assigning a role to the AI, use examples (few-shot prompting) when helpful, break down complex tasks, and specify your desired output format.

Pro Tip: Try taking a sample prompt from a library and asking your specific LLM to analyze it and adapt it for your specific needs or JTBD (Job To Be Done). Also consider using the sample prompt to get a sample output then supply a real-world output as a guide and ask your LLM how to update the prompt you used to get closer to the desired output. This leverages a previous topic known as “Reverse Engineering” to craft a prompt bespoke to your specific JTBD, aligned to your desired output and leveraging best practices from the prompt library.

Your Journey to Prompt Mastery

Transforming LLMs into powerful, specialized assistants is achievable through strategic prompt engineering. This is no longer a niche skill but a fundamental competency for thriving in an AI-augmented world.

The landscape of LLMs and prompting is dynamic, so a commitment to continuous learning and experimentation is key. By exploring the resources in this cheat sheet and actively engaging with the prompting community, you can unlock significant productivity gains, foster innovation, and establish a sustained advantage.

Becoming a master of these techniques and prompts ensures your place in a future that belongs to those who can effectively communicate their intent to these powerful new AI partners.