Prompt Engineering Essentials
Get reliable results from LLMs — the prompting patterns that actually hold up in real applications.
beginner · 45 minutes
Prompt engineering is the practical craft of shaping a language model's output by controlling its input. This course teaches what prompts actually do (condition a probability distribution over text, not "program" a computer), how to structure clear and testable prompts, and how to avoid the common myths that waste effort. You'll work through concrete before/after examples and learn to evaluate prompts with real test sets instead of gut feeling.
What you'll learn
- What Prompting Actually Controls
- Anatomy of a Strong Prompt
- Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and Chain-of-Thought
- Roles, Format Control, and Reducing Ambiguity
- Decomposition and Grounding
- Evaluating Prompts and Handling Untrusted Input