What are the 5 prompting techniques worth learning (and the ones that are outdated)?

The techniques that still pay off: give the AI relevant context and background, show it 1-3 examples of what good output looks like (few-shot), break big tasks into steps, tell it exactly what format you want, and iterate, decompose and refine instead of accepting draft one. Meanwhile, old tricks like elaborate role-play personas ('you are a world-class expert...'), threatening or tipping the model, and manually writing 'think step by step' matter far less with modern reasoning models. In short: clarity, examples, and context beat magic phrases.