Prompt Engineering Foundations
Core concepts: what prompt engineering is, how prompts act as interfaces, and the fundamentals of intent, context, and format.
1. What Is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing instructions that guide a language model to produce useful, reliable, an
2. Prompts as Interfaces
A prompt is an interface between a human and a language model. Just as a UI has buttons and forms, a prompt has instruct
3. The Difference Between Asking and Directing
Asking is open-ended: "Tell me about marketing." Directing is specific: "Write a 3-step marketing plan for a local coffe
4. Intent, Context, Task, and Format
Every effective prompt has four components: Intent (what you want to achieve), Context (background the model needs), Tas
5. Common Beginner Mistakes
Beginners often make five mistakes: (1) Being too vague — the model guesses and guesses wrong. (2) Overloading a single
6. Capstone: Your First Engineered Prompt
In this capstone, you will combine everything from Module 1. Your task is to take a completely vague request — "help me