Prompt Engineering

Knowledge

You already know the basics: be specific, provide context, define format. You know what Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and Chain-of-Thought mean. But there's a big difference between "writing good prompts" and "doing systematic prompt engineering."

Prompt Engineering is the discipline of methodically designing, testing, and optimizing prompts -- not through trial and error, but through understanding the underlying mechanisms. It's the difference between "let me try something" and "I know why this technique works for this problem."

Understand

What sets advanced practitioners apart from beginners?

A beginner writes good prompts. An advanced practitioner understands why they work and can systematically choose the right approach:

1. Apply techniques deliberately: You don't just know that Chain-of-Thought exists, but when it's better than Few-Shot -- and when you should combine both.
2. Think in multiple stages: Instead of cramming everything into one prompt, you break complex tasks into Prompt Chains -- a sequence of prompts that build on each other.
3. Consider security: You understand how Prompt Injection works and how to harden System Prompts.
4. Work reproducibly: Your prompts are documented, versioned, and systematically structured -- not accidentally good.

What to expect in this module

• Chain-of-Thought in depth -- Why step-by-step reasoning works, Self-Consistency, and practical application
• Advanced techniques -- Strategic Few-Shot, Prompt Chaining, Meta-Prompting, Tree-of-Thought
• Prompt Injection -- Understanding attack vectors and implementing defenses
• System Prompts -- Best practices, CLAUDE.md, and persistent instructions

Apply

Before diving into the individual lessons, think of a concrete problem from your daily work that you've been solving with simple prompts so far. Keep this problem in mind -- by the end of this module, you'll be able to solve it significantly better with an advanced technique.

Reflect