Master effective prompting for ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots. Learn how to craft precise instructions that get you the results you need. This beginner-friendly course teaches practical techniques to turn AI conversations into powerful productivity tools.

Effective Prompt Engineering with Chat AI

Effective Prompt Engineering with Chat AI

Instructor: CodeSignal Certificates
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October 2026
2 assignments
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There are 24 modules in this course
This lesson introduces the basics of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their core functionality as next-word prediction machines. It explains how LLMs like GPT-4o and others analyze vast amounts of text data to learn language patterns and make predictions. The lesson also touches on the role of prompt engineering in guiding LLMs towards predictable and accurate outcomes, setting the stage for practical exercises in mastering LLM outputs.
What's included
1 reading5 app items
1 reading•Total 3 minutes
- Understanding LLMs•3 minutes
5 app items•Total 16 minutes
- Lesson: Introduction to Large Language Models and Prompt Engineering Basics•4 minutes
- Practice: Predicting the Next Word in Space Exploration Context•3 minutes
- Practice: Predicting the Next Word in a Sequence•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Prompt for Predictable One-Word Response•3 minutes
- Practice: Consistently Returning Zero•3 minutes
This lesson explores the significance of consistent formatting and organization in crafting prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). It introduces the Markdown Prompts Framework (MPF), a method for structuring prompts to enhance clarity and effectiveness. The lesson includes examples of applying MPF and provides practice opportunities to interact with LLMs through a user interface, reinforcing the skills needed to create efficient and effective prompts.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Effective Prompt Engineering with the Markdown Prompts Framework•4 minutes
- Practice: Separating ASK from CONSTRAINTS for Enhanced Readability•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Space Corgi Joke with Cosmo•3 minutes
- Practice: Restructuring Prompts for Clarity and Effectiveness•3 minutes
This lesson explores the critical role of well-crafted examples in designing effective prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). It emphasizes how examples guide LLMs towards desired responses by providing context and format, ultimately enhancing the quality and relevance of the generated output. Through practical illustrations, the lesson demonstrates how clear examples can significantly improve prompt outcomes.
What's included
5 app items
5 app items•Total 16 minutes
- Lesson: The Importance of Great Examples in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Reorganizing Prompts for Effective LLM Output•3 minutes
- Practice: Refining Prompts with Example Integration•3 minutes
- Practice: Developing a Remote Work Transition Plan for a Software Development Team•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting Effective Prompts with Multiple Examples•3 minutes
This lesson explores the concept of context limits in Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Claude 2, and LLaMA. It explains what context limits are, how they have evolved over time, and their implications on prompt design. The lesson also provides strategies for overcoming these limitations, such as prompt compression, focused queries, and iterative prompting, to optimize interactions with LLMs and produce high-quality outputs.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Introduction to Context Limits in Large Language Models•4 minutes
- Practice: Transforming Unorganized Data into a Markdown Table•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating Concise Prompts for Project Documentation•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Markdown Table of LLM Context Limits•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on enhancing prompt engineering skills by effectively communicating with Large Language Models (LLMs) through style specifications. It covers how to guide LLMs in producing desired text "flavors" by specifying tone, language, and length, thereby achieving tailored, precise, and consistent results for various applications.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Effective Communication with LLMs: Mastering Style Specifications•4 minutes
- Practice: Futuristic AI Cafe Dialogue Prompt Creation•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Futuristic Short Story on Unity•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating an Engaging Machine Learning Summary Prompt•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on mastering the art of controlling output length when interacting with Large Language Models like GPT-4. It covers techniques for designing prompts to achieve desired response sizes, from single words to detailed articles, by specifying output size, context, and constraints. The lesson emphasizes the importance of prompt design in guiding models to produce content that meets specific requirements, enhancing applications from concise data generation to comprehensive content creation.
What's included
1 reading4 app items
1 reading•Total 3 minutes
- Engineering LLM Output Size•3 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Core Principles of Getting the Right Size form One Try•4 minutes
- Practice: Transforming a Simplistic Prompt into a Structured Advertisement Tagline Prompt•3 minutes
- Practice: Refining a Vague Request into a Detailed Guide for Eco-Friendly Brand Naming•3 minutes
- Practice: Defining AI-Powered Tutoring in Three Sentences•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on refining prompts to obtain single-word outputs from LLMs, specifically for designing an AI tutor that evaluates code correctness. It emphasizes the importance of directing LLMs to provide binary verdicts, "True" or "False," by crafting clear and specific prompts. The lesson includes examples and encourages hands-on practice through a UI to solidify understanding.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Refining Prompts for Binary Code Verdicts•4 minutes
- Practice: Analyzing Python Code for Palindrome Check•3 minutes
- Practice: Confirm Keyword Presence in Python Code•3 minutes
- Practice: Single-Word Response Evaluation Task•3 minutes
This lesson teaches how to craft prompts for LLMs to generate concise, single-sentence summaries of financial market trends. It emphasizes the importance of clear constraints and expectations in prompts to achieve quick insights, and includes practice opportunities through a user interface for refining and submitting solutions.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Crafting Single-Sentence Summaries with LLMs•4 minutes
- Practice: Crafting a Single-Sentence Summary of Market Reactions to Interest Rate Hike•3 minutes
- Practice: Generating a One-Sentence Explanation of Memoization's Impact on Fibonacci Calculations•3 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Sales Data Insights•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on strategies to elicit longer, more detailed responses from Large Language Models (LLMs). It covers both simple and complex approaches, including directly requesting detailed responses and using iterative enhancement techniques. The lesson aims to equip learners with the skills to craft prompts that encourage LLMs to provide comprehensive and expansive outputs, enhancing interactions in scenarios like storytelling and in-depth analysis.
What's included
5 app items
5 app items•Total 16 minutes
- Lesson: Eliciting Detailed Responses from LLMs•4 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Sales Strategy Course Syllabus Prompt•3 minutes
- Practice: Enhancing Prompts for Detailed Syllabus Creation•3 minutes
- Practice: Iterative Enhancement of a Sales Strategy Syllabus•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting Iterative Prompts for Detailed Sales Strategy•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on using advanced prompt engineering techniques to craft professional emails with language models. It emphasizes achieving a balance between conciseness and completeness, using structured prompts to guide the model in generating emails that are well-organized and easy to read, such as the F-shaped format. The lesson aims to enhance the learner's ability to direct language models to produce precise and optimally structured outputs.
What's included
3 app items
3 app items•Total 10 minutes
- Lesson: Crafting Professional Emails with LLMs: Balancing Conciseness and Completeness•4 minutes
- Practice: Crafting an F-Shaped Professional Email Prompt•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting a Professional F-Shaped Email Prompt•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on teaching the essential skills for customizing and controlling output formats from Large Language Models (LLMs). It emphasizes the importance of clear and detailed prompt formatting to enhance communication with LLMs, ensuring effective and usable outputs. Through examples, it demonstrates how to specify desired formats, such as lists or JSON objects, to achieve precise and predictable results.
What's included
1 reading4 app items
1 reading•Total 3 minutes
- Format Control in Prompt Engineering•3 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Formatting Fundamentals: Crafting Precise Prompts•4 minutes
- Practice: Ensuring Bulleted List Output•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting Structured JSON Responses for Team Member Details•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Structured Motivational Quote Prompt•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate structured, bulleted list responses. It emphasizes the importance of clarity and precision in prompt engineering, providing techniques to explicitly request bulleted formats and include sub-bullets for enhanced detail. The lesson aims to improve the clarity and usability of AI-generated outputs across various applications.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Bullets of Clarity: Structuring List Responses in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Prompt for Mental Benefits of Hydration•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Two-Layered Bulleted List for Cognitive Benefits of Hydration•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting a Prompt for Cognitive Benefits of Hydration•3 minutes
This lesson teaches prompt engineers how to guide LLMs to produce outputs structured with markdown headers, enhancing readability and organization. It emphasizes the importance of explicit formatting instructions and examples in prompts to achieve well-organized responses. The lesson includes examples of basic, enhanced, and advanced prompt structuring to demonstrate how to control the output format effectively.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Crafting LLM Prompts for Markdown Header-Organized Outputs•4 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Markdown Outline for Cellular Respiration•3 minutes
- Practice: Outlining Photosynthesis Steps with Markdown Headers•3 minutes
- Practice: Organizing Mitosis with Markdown Headers•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on teaching the principles and techniques for instructing Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate structured data formats like JSON and YAML. It emphasizes the importance of precision in instructions and contextual clarity to achieve well-defined, machine-readable outputs. Through examples, learners gain the skills needed to effectively prompt LLMs for tasks involving data manipulation and system integration.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 12 minutes
- Lesson: Structured Data Mastery in Prompt Engineering•3 minutes
- Practice: Generating User Information in JSON Format•3 minutes
- Practice: Generating Car Information in Various Formats•3 minutes
- Practice: Building Websites with LLM•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on developing the skill of crafting prompts that guide LLMs to generate executable code. It emphasizes the importance of clarity and precision in prompts to ensure the code is immediately runnable without modifications. The lesson includes examples of refining prompts to exclude non-code elements, ensuring the output is clean and ready for execution.
What's included
1 assignment4 app items
1 assignment•Total 10 minutes
- Knowledge Check•10 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Constructing Prompts for Executable Code•4 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Precise SQL Query Prompt•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Precise SQL Table Creation Prompt•3 minutes
- Practice: Creating a Weather Data Scraping Script with LLM Guidance•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on prompt engineering techniques for summarizing text while preserving crucial elements such as tone, specific facts, and stylistic nuances. It emphasizes the importance of defining what needs to be maintained in summaries and provides strategies for crafting effective prompts to achieve this. Through examples, the lesson illustrates how to guide LLMs to produce concise and meaningful summaries that retain the original content's unique characteristics.
What's included
1 reading4 app items
1 reading•Total 3 minutes
- Prompt Engineering for Precise Text Modification•3 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Efficient Summarization and Element Preservation in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Albert Einstein's Legacy While Preserving Tone•3 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Einstein's Legacy in Modern Physics•3 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Einstein's Publications in a Bulleted List•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on crafting prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate summaries that exclude specific elements, such as sensitive information or irrelevant details. It provides strategies and examples for structuring prompts to ensure the desired information is omitted, enhancing the ability to customize outputs to fit specific needs.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Crafting Prompts for Exclusionary Summarization•4 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Steve Job's Technological Contributions•3 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Steve Job's Technological Contributions•3 minutes
- Practice: Summarizing Steve Job's Achievements in Technology and Design•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on the skill of extending or elaborating on a given text using Large Language Models (LLMs) while preserving specific predefined elements such as setting, characters, and mood. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining a balance between creativity and constraints to ensure that additions feel seamless and natural. The lesson includes an example using the Markdown Prompt Framework to illustrate how to structure prompts effectively and highlights the significance of practice in mastering precise text modification.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Prompt Engineering for Text Extension and Constraint Management•4 minutes
- Practice: Extending a Dark Fantasy Scene with a Spectral Relevation•3 minutes
- Practice: Extending a Fantasy Narrative with Enigmatic Elements•3 minutes
- Practice: Extending a Gothic Fantasy Tale with Consistency•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on the task of extending text while deliberately altering specific elements, referred to as "X." It explores strategies for instructing Large Language Models (LLMs) to make nuanced modifications without losing the original text's coherence. The lesson covers identifying elements to change, setting extension parameters, providing context, and crafting structured prompts using the Markdown Prompts Framework. Through practice, learners can master the technique of generating content that integrates new elements seamlessly with the original text.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Extending Text with Precise Modifications in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Transforming Fear to Hope in a Thriller Narrative•3 minutes
- Practice: Transforming a Thriller: From Nighttime Fear to Dawn Determination•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting a Calming Character Narrative Extension•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on teaching the skill of directing Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill in missing parts of a text while ensuring the new content fits seamlessly within the existing context, style, and narrative flow. It covers the concept of text integration, the importance of providing clear context and constraints, and how to craft precise prompts for effective text modification. The lesson emphasizes experimentation and iteration to master the technique, which is valuable for creative writing and tasks involving text modification or expansion.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Prompt Engineering for Seamless Text Integration•4 minutes
- Practice: Detective Story Dialogue Insertion Task•3 minutes
- Practice: Crafting Intriguing Detective Dialogue•3 minutes
- Practice: Identifying Character Dialogue with Markers•3 minutes
This lesson delves into advanced techniques in prompt engineering, focusing on creating effective system prompts to guide LLMs like ChatGPT. It covers the importance of system messages, strategies for configuring them to achieve high-quality outputs, and how to set tone and style globally. The lesson encourages experimentation and practice to enhance the predictability and quality of AI-driven responses.
What's included
1 reading4 app items
1 reading•Total 3 minutes
- Advanced Techniques in Prompt Engineering•3 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Advanced Techniques in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Crafting System Prompts•3 minutes
- Practice: Adapting AI Expertise to Information Technology•3 minutes
- Practice: Transforming AI into a Supportive Software Development Tutor•3 minutes
This lesson focuses on mastering iterative prompt construction with Large Language Models (LLMs). It teaches how to start with simple prompts and refine them iteratively using LLM outputs to achieve precise and desired results. The lesson includes examples of transforming bulleted lists into JSON documents and emphasizes the importance of refining prompts through constraints and examples. The practice section allows learners to interact with LLMs via a chat interface to apply these techniques.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Iterative Prompt Construction with LLMs•4 minutes
- Practice: Converting Bulleted Lists to JSON Documents•3 minutes
- Practice: Converting Bulleted Lists to JSON Format•3 minutes
- Practice: Iterative Prompt Construction for Markdown Checkbox List Conversion•3 minutes
This lesson explores the use of brainstorming techniques to refine and enhance prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). It covers generating a wide range of ideas, iterative prompt refinement, and consolidating ideas to achieve the best outcomes. The lesson emphasizes using a UI to interact with LLMs and encourages learners to practice these techniques to improve solution quality.
What's included
4 app items
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Brainstorming Techniques in Prompt Engineering•4 minutes
- Practice: Showcasing Artists' Portfolios on Social Media•3 minutes
- Practice: Iterative Brainstorming•3 minutes
- Practice: Consolidator Prompt for Evaluating Social Media Engagement Ideas•3 minutes
This lesson delves into the Chain-of-Thought method in prompt engineering, a technique that enhances the logical reasoning of language models by encouraging them to "think aloud" through complex problems. It explains the significance of designing prompts that guide models to work methodically rather than guessing, and provides examples of applying this method to improve accuracy in tasks like mathematical computations. The lesson concludes with a practice session where learners can interact with an LLM through a UI to apply the Chain-of-Thought approach.
What's included
1 assignment4 app items
1 assignment•Total 10 minutes
- Knowledge Check•10 minutes
4 app items•Total 13 minutes
- Lesson: Advanced Techniques in Prompt Engineering: Chain-of-Thought Method•4 minutes
- Practice: Guiding AI to Multiple Using Chain of Thought•3 minutes
- Practice: Using Chain-of-Thought for Word Problem Solving•3 minutes
- Chain of Thought Math Prompt Engineering•3 minutes
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