Prompt Engineering
AGAI 103
Master the art and science of writing effective prompts. Learn how prompt structure, context, and framing dramatically affect model outputs, and explore advanced techniques like chain-of-thought, few-shot prompting, and system prompt design.
Prompt Engineering: More Than Asking Questions
A prompt is more than a question. It is a specification for the behavior you want from a language model. The way you frame a prompt — what context you provide, how you structure the instructions, what examples you include — has an enormous effect on the quality and reliability of the output.
From Intuition to Technique
This course transforms prompt writing from intuition into a systematic discipline. You will learn what makes prompts work, why they sometimes fail, and how to diagnose and improve them. You will study concrete techniques used by professional prompt engineers and AI application developers.
What You Will Learn
You will gain a systematic toolkit for writing effective prompts: zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot approaches; chain-of-thought and reasoning prompts; role and persona assignment; system prompt design for AI applications; and practical methods for diagnosing and fixing poorly performing prompts. You will also learn how to identify and defend against prompt injection attacks.
Who This Course Is For
This course is for developers, AI engineers, and practitioners who want to get consistently better results from language models. If you have experimented with LLM APIs or chat interfaces and noticed that phrasing makes a big difference — but you are not sure why — this course gives you the principles and techniques to make prompt design a reliable skill rather than trial and error.
What you will learn
- Explain how prompts influence model behavior
- Apply zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot techniques
- Use chain-of-thought prompting to elicit better reasoning
- Design effective system prompts for AI applications
- Identify and mitigate prompt injection vulnerabilities
- Evaluate and iteratively improve prompts
Major topics
Why this course matters
Prompt engineering is the primary interface between developers and AI models. A well-engineered prompt can dramatically improve reliability and output quality; a poorly engineered one can produce hallucinations, biased outputs, or security vulnerabilities.
Course modules
Foundations of Prompting
Learn the core principles of prompt engineering, including prompt structure, examples, reasoning prompts, sampling behavior, and iterative prompt development.
Advanced Prompting Techniques
Use few-shot examples, structured output, schema validation, and function calling to build more reliable LLM applications.
Common misconceptions
Prompt engineering is just rephrasing questions
Better models eliminate the need for prompt engineering
Prompt injection only affects consumer chatbots
Longer prompts are always more effective
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