A gist is a prompt template that is designed to automate a repetitive task.

Let’s take a look at how gists are created.

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Example

Many people use ChatGPT to draft emails with prompts like this:

Write an email draft:
- Greet them
- Ask about the progress of project
- Mention that it's been late for 1 week
- Let them know that we can help and wish for some update

Be succinct, direct, but polite.

This prompt consists of two parts: the instruction part and the content part.

While the contents can change case by case, the instructions for the tasks are highly reusable.

In the above example, we’ve just created our first gist by placing a placeholder {{content}} in the prompt template.

By saving this gist with a name, such as email-draft, next time we want to create an email draft, we can just type the outline and provide it to the gist.

To see how to run a gist, take a look at the quick start guide.

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Automatable tasks with gists

We can create gists for any of the following tasks that people automate with LLMs:

  • Classification
  • Information extraction
  • Question answering
  • Summarization
  • Editing
  • Brainstorming
  • Translation