From User to Engineer
In AI Foundation School you learned prompting as a user. Now you'll learn it as an engineer — designing prompts that are reliable, testable, and production-ready. The difference is repeatability: a good engineering prompt produces consistent results across thousands of inputs.
Core Patterns
- Zero-shot: direct instruction with no examples
- Few-shot: 2-5 examples showing the expected input→output pattern
- Chain-of-thought: 'Think step by step' to improve reasoning
- Structured output: 'Respond in JSON with keys: sentiment, confidence'
Production prompts should always specify the output format. Unstructured outputs are hard to parse and break downstream systems.
Key Takeaway
Engineering-grade prompts are structured, testable, and specify exact output formats. They're code, not conversation.