Prompt Engineering for Vertex AI Gemini: Advanced Techniques to Control Model Behavior in Production
Key Takeaways * Moving beyond demos to production-ready AI requires structured prompt engineering, not just simple conversational instructions. * Advanced techniques like few-shot examples (showing, not telling), Chain-of-Thought reasoning, and negative constraints are essential for controlling model behavior and ensuring reliable, consistent outputs. * Prompt engineering has its limits. For complex or private knowledge bases, you must graduate to more advanced methods like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or fine-tuning. I once saw a production AI system, designed to summarize customer support tickets, go completely off the rails. It was supposed to spit out a neat, three-bullet summary. Instead, it started hallucinating that it was a financial advisor and began telling customers with billing issues to "diversify their portfolio." The root cause? A lazy, one-line prompt: "Summarize the following ticket." This is the dirty little secret of buildin...
