Zero to AI engineer · Stop 4 of 14 lessons

Prompting, as a real skill

What this lesson covers

Prompting is a real skill that maxes out in about a week if you know what to practice. This lesson names the moves that matter and skips the folklore (“say please”, “you are an expert”).

The outline

1. The instruction, plainly. Say what you want, in what form, with what constraints. Most bad prompts fail here.
2. Role and framing. When “you are a…” earns its cost and when it’s noise.
3. Examples (few-shot). The single highest-leverage move. Why one good example beats a paragraph of description.
4. Structure. Delimiters, XML tags, headings — how to make the model’s job parsing your request as easy as answering it.
5. What to do about a bad answer. A four-question triage: was the task underspecified? was the input malformed? was there no correct answer? is the model just wrong here?
6. When prompting stops helping. The signs it’s time to reach for structured output, tools, retrieval, or a bigger model instead.

Coming soon

In outline. Full write-up soon.