Welcome & how this works

Most people write prompts the way they write search queries: a few words, a vague intent, and hope. That habit produces vague answers. This course replaces that habit with a set of techniques you can apply immediately.

What this course is

Nineteen lessons on prompt engineering. Each lesson covers one technique. The lessons are short by design — the goal is that you practice the technique during the lesson, not after it.

The structure is consistent across every lesson. You get a short explainer, one or more before/after prompt examples, prompts to try in Claude yourself, and a deliverable that tells you whether you actually understood the technique or just read about it. If the deliverable doesn't work, you haven't finished the lesson.

What you will be able to do when you finish

By the end of module one, you will know how to structure a prompt so Claude understands what you want, who it is writing for, and what format to produce. That alone eliminates roughly 80% of the frustrating answers most people get from Claude on the first try.

By the end of module two, you will be able to separate data from instructions, request structured output like JSON, and guide Claude's reasoning step by step. These are the techniques that separate a person who uses AI from a person who uses AI well.

By the end of module three, you will have built prompts for three real professional domains — legal, finance, and code — and you will understand how to prevent the specific failure mode that causes Claude to invent facts it doesn't know.

Module four covers the techniques that power production systems: chaining prompts, calling external tools, and connecting Claude to documents it has never seen.

How to practise

Keep Claude open in another tab (claude.ai or Claude Desktop) and work alongside each lesson. You can run the same prompt multiple times with different wording and compare the results side by side. This is the fastest way to develop an intuition for what the model responds to.

The prompts listed at the top of each lesson are starting points, not exercises with one right answer. Use them to get your first response, then modify them and observe what changes.

Prerequisites

None. If you can type a sentence, you can work through this course.

If you get stuck

If a lesson's deliverable doesn't click, the most common cause is that the concept hasn't been tried with your own material yet. The examples in each lesson are generic by necessity. Swap in a real task from your work — a real email, a real document, a real piece of code — and the technique usually lands.

Deliverable

Type a prompt into Claude. Any prompt. Observe the response. Then modify one element — audience, format, or length — and run it again. Notice what changed.