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home/pathways/prompt-engineering
BeginnerLearning Pathway

Prompt Engineering

Go from vague requests that produce mediocre outputs to precise, reproducible prompts that work every time. The skill that underpins everything else in AI.

14articles
~5htotal
Beginner
Start Pathway →All Pathways

What you'll learn

  • Zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting — and when to use each
  • How temperature, top-P, and top-K control creativity and determinism
  • Why context engineering is broader than prompt engineering — and how to do both
  • How to write system prompts that reliably shape model behavior
  • Structured output and JSON mode for programmatic AI integration
  • How to build an eval set and measure prompt quality systematically

Curriculum — 14 articles

01

Mollick: Prompting Tricks Are Over — Write Specs

Wharton Prompting Science Reports 1–4 on CoT, personas, tips, and management.

13m→
02

What Is a System Prompt?

The hidden instructions that shape every AI response — explained.

8m→
03

Zero-Shot vs Few-Shot vs Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Three prompting paradigms and when to use each.

10m→
04

Temperature, Top-P, and Top-K in LLMs

The sampling parameters that control creativity and determinism.

8m→
05

Context Engineering: Why Clean Prompts Matter

The full discipline of assembling everything the model sees — from RAG to tool schemas to history.

15m→
06

ReAct Prompting: Reasoning + Acting for AI Agents

The Thought/Action/Observation loop that powers most modern AI agents.

12m→
07

Structured Output & JSON Mode Prompting

Get reliable JSON from LLMs — schemas, validation, and retry patterns.

12m→
08

Structured Output with tool_use and JSON Schemas

Why tool_use guarantees schema compliance when JSON-in-prompt doesn't — nullable fields, validation-retry loops, and enum design.

14m→
09

How to Evaluate Prompt Quality

Build an eval set, run A/B tests, and measure what actually matters.

12m→
10

Prompt Engineering vs Fine-Tuning vs RAG

A durable decision tree: change instructions, retrieve current knowledge, or teach stable behavior.

quiz12m→
11

Top AI Prompts for Coding

20 structured templates that actually produce useful code.

10m→
12

Top AI Prompts for Productivity

20 structured templates for getting more done with AI.

10m→
13

Top AI Prompts for Research

20 structured templates for AI-assisted research work.

10m→
14

Master Prompt Engineering with Claude

Claude-specific patterns and techniques for better outputs.

12m→

Start learning

Prompt Engineering

Articles14
Time commitment~5h
LevelBeginner
AccessFree
Start Pathway →

Free account. No credit card needed.

Who this is for

  • →Anyone who uses AI tools and wants more reliable outputs
  • →Developers integrating LLMs into applications
  • →Content creators, marketers, and writers who rely on AI daily
  • →Product managers defining AI-powered features

After this pathway

Walk away with a personal library of structured prompt templates and the discipline to iterate on prompts systematically rather than by trial and error.

Frequently asked questions

What is prompt engineering and why does it matter?+

Prompt engineering is the practice of writing clear, structured messages that reliably produce the AI outputs you want. It covers techniques like chain-of-thought (asking the model to reason step by step), few-shot examples (showing the model what good looks like), and output format constraints. Without prompt engineering fundamentals, even powerful AI models produce inconsistent, hard-to-use results.

Is this the same as learning to use ChatGPT?+

Prompt engineering is broader than using any single product. The techniques — zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, structured output — apply across Claude, GPT, Gemini, and any other LLM. This pathway teaches model-agnostic fundamentals, not product-specific tips that become obsolete when the product updates.

How long does the Prompt Engineering pathway take?+

11 articles, approximately 5 hours total. Many practitioners revisit individual articles when working on specific prompt engineering problems rather than reading all 11 in sequence.

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I

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I

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B

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