Canonical prompt-engineering operating procedure distilled from Google's 68-page Prompt Engineering whitepaper (Lee Boonstra, Feb 2025): when to use zero/few-shot, system/contextual/role prompting, chain-of-thought, step-back, self-consistency, ToT, ReAct, output-format control, and exact temperature/top-K/top-P starting values. Trigger whenever writing, reviewing, or debugging a prompt for an LLM, choosing sampling configuration, or deciding which prompting technique fits a task.
