Prompt Engineering with Octopus

The Octopus AI interface uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to answer plain English questions about an Octopus space. LLMs are rapidly evolving and improving their ability to understand the relationships between complex object like those that make up an Octopus space. However, today, the ability to extract useful information when querying an LLM is heavily influenced by the structure of the question. Building questions that generate the desired result is called Prompt Engineering.

Including resources in the context

The most important factor when querying Octopus AI is to include the correct keywords to identify the kinds of resources the question relates to. LLMs have a context limit which means they can only be supplied a small subset of the configuration that makes up an Octopus space. The subset of resources included in the context is defined by a number of keywords you must include in a query.

The table below lists the keywords recognized by Octopus AI, the resources the keywords relate to, and an example query demonstrating how the keyword is used.

Resource	Keyword	Good Example	Bad Example	Notes
Deployment Projects	project	What does the "Deploy Web App" project do?	What does "Deploy Web App" do?
Deployment targets or agents	target, machine, or agent	What URL is the "K8s" machine configured with?	What URL does "K8s" have?	Prefer to use the word machine over target as target can sometimes trigger the LLM content filters.
Runbooks	runbook	Does the runbook "restart web server" in the project "web app" include a bash script?	Does "restart web server" include a bash script?	Include the project that the runbook belongs to.
Tenants	tenant	What is the description of the "US-EAST-1" tenant?	What is the description of "US-EAST-1"?
Library Variable Sets	library variable set	What variables are included in the library variable set "AWS"?	What variables are included in "AWS"?
Environments	environment	Does the "Production" environment allow dynamic infrastructure?	Does "Production" allow dynamic infrastructure?
Feeds	feed	What URL does the "Docker" feed use?	What URL does "Docker" use?
Accounts	account	What is the access key for the "AWS Production" account?	What is the access key for "AWS Production"?
Certificates	certificate	What is the description of the "Test Web Server" certificate?	What is the description of "Test Web Server"?
Lifecycles	lifecycle	What environments are part of the "Application" lifecycle?	What environments are part of "Application"
Worker Pools	worker pool	What is the description of the "Azure" worker pool?	What is the description of "Azure"?
Machine Policies	policy	What does the health check script for the "K8s Worker" machine policy do?	What does the health check script for "K8s Worker" do?
Tenant Tag Sets	tag	What tags are assigned to the tenant "Store 1"?	What groups does the tenant "Store 1" belong to?
Project Groups	group	What projects belong to the "Default" project group?	What belongs to "Default"?
Deployment Process or Runbook steps	step	What does the "Deploy to Azure" step in the "Web App" project do?	What does "Deploy to Azure" do?
Variables	variable	Which steps in the "Web App" project is the "DatabasePassord" variable used in?	Where is "DatabasePassord" used?
Releases	release	What is the latest release for the "Web App" project?	What is the latest version of the "Web App" project?