Prompt Engineering

Explore & Discover

Open ChatGPT (chat.openai.com — free), Claude (claude.ai — free), or Google Gemini and start asking it things. But here is the twist: ask the same question three different ways and compare the answers. Try "Tell me about the Great Salt Lake" — then try "Explain the Great Salt Lake water crisis to a 10-year-old" — then try "Write a dramatic one-paragraph description of the Great Salt Lake shrinking, from the perspective of a pelican who lives there." Notice how dramatically the outputs change based on how you asked. The AI did not get smarter — your prompt got more specific. You're ready for the next step when you can show three clearly different AI outputs from the same base topic and explain what changed in each prompt that caused the difference.

Learn the Basics

Learn the five core elements that make a prompt work: (1) Role — tell the AI who to be ("You are an expert marine biologist"). (2) Task — be specific about exactly what you want. (3) Context — give relevant background information. (4) Format — specify how you want the answer structured (bullet list, paragraph, table, code). (5) Constraints — set limits like word count, reading level, or tone. Practice combining all five in a single prompt. A great free resource is Learn Prompting (learnprompting.org) — it is free, clear, and goes from beginner to advanced. Try building a prompt that uses all five elements and produces a result you are genuinely impressed by. You're ready for the next step when you can write a five-element prompt from scratch and explain why each element improves the output.

Build Your First Project

Use prompt engineering to build something real and useful. Pick one of these three projects: (A) Create a study guide for a class you are currently taking by prompting the AI to explain, quiz you, and give examples at exactly the right level. (B) Write a detailed travel guide to a Utah location — Arches, Capitol Reef, Antelope Island — by prompting the AI for history, tips, and hidden spots, then fact-checking everything it says. (C) Generate the first chapter of a story by using iterative prompting: write a scene, then prompt the AI to improve specific parts, then incorporate your own edits. Document every prompt you used so you can see the process. You're ready for the next step when you have a finished, polished output and a written record of the prompts that produced it.

Experiment & Iterate

Now stress-test your prompting skills by tackling hard problems. Try chain-of-thought prompting: add "Let us think through this step by step" to a complex math or logic problem and see how the output changes. Try few-shot prompting: give the AI two or three examples of what you want before asking for the real thing. Experiment with negative constraints: "Write a product description for a bike helmet without using the words safe, protect, or durable." Try to get the AI to produce something it initially refuses by rephrasing legitimately — understand the difference between working around safety filters (bad idea) and legitimately rephrasing an ambiguous request (real skill). You're ready for the next step when you can demonstrate three different advanced prompting techniques and explain when each one is most useful.

Advanced Techniques

Go beyond chat interfaces and learn how prompts work in real AI systems. Sign up for a free Hugging Face account (huggingface.co) and try running a few open-source models — notice how prompt sensitivity varies between models. Learn what a system prompt is and why it matters (it is the hidden set of instructions that shapes how an AI behaves before you say anything). Research prompt injection attacks — a real cybersecurity issue where malicious text tricks AI systems into ignoring their instructions. Explore how image-generation tools like Adobe Firefly (free) or Ideogram (ideogram.ai — free tier) respond to detailed visual prompts. You're ready for the next step when you can explain what a system prompt does and demonstrate a meaningful difference in output between two different AI models given the same prompt.

Final Project Showcase

Build a Prompt Engineering Playbook: a personal reference guide with your ten best prompts, organized by use case (studying, creative writing, research, coding help, brainstorming). For each prompt, document the template, the reasoning behind each element, and a real example of the output it produced. Share your playbook as a Google Doc or Notion page and post it to a community where other learners can use it — Reddit's r/PromptEngineering or a school Discord. Write a one-page reflection: how has learning to prompt changed the way you think about asking questions — to AI and to people? You're ready for the next step when your playbook is public, contains at least ten documented prompts, and at least one person outside your household has found it useful.