Welcome to Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial

Course introduction and goals

This course is intended to provide you with a comprehensive step-by-step understanding of how to engineer optimal prompts within Claude.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

• Master the basic structure of a good prompt
• Recognize common failure modes and learn the '80/20' techniques to address them
• Understand Claude's strengths and weaknesses
• Build strong prompts from scratch for common use cases

Course structure and content

This course is structured to allow you many chances to practice writing and troubleshooting prompts yourself. The course is broken up into 9 chapters with accompanying exercises, as well as an appendix of even more advanced methods. It is intended for you to work through the course in chapter order.

Each lesson has an "Example Playground" area at the bottom where you are free to experiment with the examples in the lesson and see for yourself how changing prompts can change Claude's responses. There is also an answer key.

Note: This tutorial uses our smallest, fastest, and cheapest model, Claude 3 Haiku. Anthropic has two other models, Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus, which are more intelligent than Haiku, with Opus being the most intelligent.

This tutorial also exists on Google Sheets using Anthropic's Claude for Sheets extension. We recommend using that version as it is more user friendly.

When you are ready to begin, go to 01_Basic Prompt Structure to proceed.

Table of Contents

Each chapter consists of a lesson and a set of exercises.

Beginner

• Chapter 1: Basic Prompt Structure

• Chapter 2: Being Clear and Direct

• Chapter 3: Assigning Roles

Intermediate

• Chapter 4: Separating Data from Instructions

• Chapter 5: Formatting Output & Speaking for Claude

• Chapter 6: Precognition (Thinking Step by Step)

• Chapter 7: Using Examples

Advanced

• Chapter 8: Avoiding Hallucinations

• Chapter 9: Building Complex Prompts (Industry Use Cases)

  • Complex Prompts from Scratch - Chatbot
  • Complex Prompts for Legal Services
  • Exercise: Complex Prompts for Financial Services
  • Exercise: Complex Prompts for Coding
  • Congratulations & Next Steps

• Appendix: Beyond Standard Prompting

  • Chaining Prompts
  • Tool Use
  • Search & Retrieval