Prompt Engineering Basics: How to Write Effective Instructions

This course teaches you how to design clear, effective prompts so AI tools understand what you need and return high-quality answers. By the end, you'll be able to build prompts systematically, guide AI with examples, get AI to show its reasoning, debug and improve your instructions, and pick the right strategy for different tasks — code generation, writing, data analysis. It's for developers and knowledge workers who have used tools like ChatGPT and Claude but want to get more out of them.

By the end of this course you'll be able to:

Understand what a prompt is and its structural elements, spot vague instructions, and rewrite them clearly
Use few-shot learning to guide AI toward the pattern you want with 2-5 examples
Apply chain-of-thought to make AI show its reasoning steps and improve accuracy on complex tasks
Debug and iterate on prompts systematically, identifying problems and improving step by step
Choose and apply the right prompt strategy for code generation, writing, data analysis, and other task types

Prerequisites: You've used a conversational AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, and the like) and understand basic text editing and describing a task.

Practice environment: You need access to at least one conversational AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.). No programming environment required.

Course outline

#	Topic	What you'll learn
01	What a Prompt Is, and Why It Matters	Understand what a prompt is, tell vague instructions from clear ones, and grasp how prompts shape AI output quality
02	The Basic Structure of a Prompt	Master the four core elements of a prompt (role, task, format, constraints) and rewrite vague requests as structured instructions
03	Few-Shot Learning: Guiding AI with Examples	Use 2-5 examples to show AI the pattern you want, tell zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot apart, and pick high-quality examples
04	Chain-of-Thought: Making AI Show Its Reasoning	Improve accuracy on complex tasks by asking AI to show its reasoning steps, applying the "let's think step by step" technique
05	Debugging and Improving Prompts	Systematically spot prompt problems, diagnose causes, iterate, and build an effective debugging routine
06	Prompt Strategies for Different Tasks	Apply the best prompt strategy for different task types — code generation, writing, data analysis

See sources.md for the source list.