AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is self-ask?
Self-ask: A prompting pattern where the model states follow-up questions it needs to answer first ('Are follow-up questions needed here?'), answers them one by one, often with a search tool, and then composes the final answer to a multi-hop question.
Self-ask: an example
For 'Who is older, the CEO of Infosys or of TCS?', it asks for each person's birth year before comparing.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Self-consistency
- Self-refine
- Skeleton-of-Thought
- Sliding window history
- Stateless API
- Step-back prompting
- Stop sequence
- Structured extraction
Where you learn it
Self-ask is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.