Craft, test, and iterate prompts that deliver reliable outputs across LLMs. Covers prompt optimization techniques, structured prompt design, synthetic test data generation, and evaluation methodology.
When to Use This Skill
- Building or optimizing prompts for AI-powered features
- Crafting system prompts for agents or assistants
- Improving reliability and consistency of LLM outputs
- Generating synthetic test data to validate prompt behavior
- Evaluating prompt performance across edge cases
- Designing prompt chains and pipelines
Quick Reference
| Task | Load reference |
|---|---|
| Prompt techniques and patterns | skills/prompt-engineering/references/techniques.md |
| Synthetic test data generation | skills/prompt-engineering/references/synthetic-data.md |
Workflow
- Research: Gather the use case, constraints, and evaluation criteria. Audit existing prompts and model behaviors.
- Design: Draft structured prompts with examples, constraints, and evaluation hooks. Plan experiments and measurement strategy.
- Generate test data: Analyze prompt variables, generate diverse and realistic test cases to validate the prompt.
- Validate: Run prompt trials, capture outputs, document adjustments. Iterate until quality thresholds are met.
- Deliver: Hand off the final prompt with usage guidance and evaluation results.
Core Principle
When creating prompts, always display the complete prompt text in a clearly marked section. Never describe a prompt without showing it. The prompt must be copyable and self-contained.
Deliverables Checklist
For every prompt engineering task, produce:
- The complete prompt text (displayed in full, properly formatted)
- Explanation of design choices and techniques used
- Usage guidelines (model, temperature, parameters)
- Example expected outputs
- Test cases covering happy path, edge cases, and adversarial inputs
Example Interactions
- "Optimize this system prompt for our code review agent"
- "Create a prompt for extracting structured data from support tickets"
- "Generate test cases to validate this classification prompt"
- "Design a prompt chain for multi-step document analysis"
- "Improve consistency of this summarization prompt"