# Niko's Key Patterns A free, open reference site for practical LLM prompt engineering techniques. Written for developers, researchers, and AI practitioners who need concrete techniques — not vendor marketing. No JavaScript, no paywalls, fully static HTML. ## Key pages - [Home](https://nikokp.com/): Overview of core prompting techniques with a comparison table, quick-start rules, and navigation to all sections. - [Techniques](https://nikokp.com/techniques.html): In-depth reference for six core techniques — zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, role prompting, self-consistency, and structured output — with copy-ready prompt templates and known failure modes. - [Advanced Techniques](https://nikokp.com/advanced-techniques.html): Production-grade prompting patterns — RAG, tool use/function calling, ReAct, prompt chaining, Tree of Thoughts, and multi-turn context management. Includes templates, research citations, and failure modes. - [Model Comparison](https://nikokp.com/model-comparison.html): Comparison of eight major LLMs (Claude, GPT-4o, o3, Gemini, Llama, Mistral) by context window, cost, and best-fit use case. - [Safety & Evaluation](https://nikokp.com/safety-and-evaluation.html): Prompt injection attacks and defenses, hallucination mitigation techniques and templates, LLM-as-judge evaluation with G-Eval, guardrails architecture and tools, and token cost optimization strategies. - [About](https://nikokp.com/about.html): Mission, audience, and rationale for the site's LLM-friendly design choices. - [Blog](https://nikokp.com/blog.html): Index of articles on web security, LLM-friendly design, and deployment practices. - [What Your Site Looks Like to an LLM — and How to Control It](https://nikokp.com/blog/llm-readability.html): Side-by-side comparison of how five AI systems parse the same HTML page. Concrete markup changes that control how LLMs cite, summarize, and retrieve your content. - [Zero Open Ports: Self-Hosting with Cloudflare Tunnel, Traefik, and Docker](https://nikokp.com/blog/self-hosting-cloudflare-tunnel.html): How to run a public-facing site with no exposed server ports. A practical walkthrough of the Cloudflare Tunnel + Traefik + Docker stack — architecture, config, and deployment. - [What Scanners Hit Your Site in the First 24 Hours — and How to Harden Before Launch](https://nikokp.com/blog/web-security-pre-launch.html): Real 404 log data from a fresh deployment shows 1,203 automated probes in 48 hours. Here's what they looked for and a pre-launch hardening checklist to stop them. ## Feeds An Atom feed is available at https://nikokp.com/feed.xml for blog post discovery. ## Content structure All pages are static HTML at the site root. No JavaScript frameworks. Core techniques on /techniques.html; advanced patterns (RAG, ReAct, tool use, prompt chaining, Tree of Thoughts) on /advanced-techniques.html; safety, evaluation and cost optimization on /safety-and-evaluation.html; model data on /model-comparison.html. All pages include JSON-LD structured data, machine-readable dates, and OpenGraph tags. ## Freshness Pages updated as techniques and model specs change. Dates are accurate and machine-readable via