Core AI

Prompt Engineering

Craft effective prompts — chain-of-thought, few-shot, RAG, system prompts and beyond

1,367
lessons
Skills in this topic
View full skill map →
Prompting Basics
beginner
Apply CoT, zero-shot, and few-shot patterns
Advanced Prompting
intermediate
Build multi-step prompt chains
Prompt Systems Engineering
intermediate
Write production system prompts
All Reads (182) Articles (5)Blog Posts (172)Tutorials (5)
5 prompt engineering techniques to get the best out of a legacy project
Dev.to · Marco Coelho ✍️ Prompt Engineering ⚡ AI Lesson 4d ago
5 prompt engineering techniques to get the best out of a legacy project
Have you ever been at a situation where you have been recently hired to maintain a legacy project, an...
The missing layer in prompt engineering: thinking quality
Dev.to · Julien Avezou ✍️ Prompt Engineering ⚡ AI Lesson 1mo ago
The missing layer in prompt engineering: thinking quality
I've seen countless prompting trends and prompt packs to use but most discussions around prompt...
How to Fine-Tune AI Models: Techniques, Examples & Step-by-Step Guide
Dev.to · Jaipal Singh ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
How to Fine-Tune AI Models: Techniques, Examples & Step-by-Step Guide
Learn how to fine-tune AI models with practical steps. Covers LoRA, full fine-tuning, dataset prep, and when fine-tuning beats RAG or prompt engineering. Real e
Context Engineering in 2026: The Skill That Actually Makes AI Coding Work
Dev.to · Alex Cloudstar ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Context Engineering in 2026: The Skill That Actually Makes AI Coding Work
The industry spent 2024 obsessing over prompt engineering. In 2026, the developers getting the best results from AI coding agents have quietly moved on to somet
Context Engineering for AI Agents: 4 Patterns That Replace Prompt Hacking
Dev.to · klement Gunndu ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Context Engineering for AI Agents: 4 Patterns That Replace Prompt Hacking
Prompt engineering optimizes how you ask. Context engineering optimizes what information surrounds the ask. Here are 4 production patterns with working Python c
Beyond the Hype: A Developer's Guide to Building with AI, Not Just Prompting It
Dev.to · Midas126 ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Beyond the Hype: A Developer's Guide to Building with AI, Not Just Prompting It
The AI Coding Paradox: More Code, More Problems? The headline is everywhere: "90% of Code...
I built a pipeline orchestrator to improve code quality beyond single-shot prompts
Dev.to · Gan ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
I built a pipeline orchestrator to improve code quality beyond single-shot prompts
Despite improvements in coding agents, single-pass prompting rarely produces production-quality...
How I Built an AI That Breeds Its Own Jailbreaks Using Genetic Algorithms
Dev.to · Regaan ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
How I Built an AI That Breeds Its Own Jailbreaks Using Genetic Algorithms
Static jailbreak lists are dead. Every time a model provider patches their safety filters, your...
How We're Solving Context Window Bloat in an AI Agent Skill Ecosystem
Dev.to · Ima Claw ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
How We're Solving Context Window Bloat in an AI Agent Skill Ecosystem
Your AI agent just got its 53rd skill installed. Image generation, video creation, social media...
Prompt Engineering Is Dead. Prompt Architecture Is What Matters.
Dev.to · The Machine Pulse ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Prompt Engineering Is Dead. Prompt Architecture Is What Matters.
Stop tweaking words. Start designing systems. Five production prompt patterns — routing, fallback chains, structured output, validation loops, cost tr
Chat Completions vs OpenAI Responses API: What Actually Changed
Dev.to · Vaishali ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Chat Completions vs OpenAI Responses API: What Actually Changed
While learning about structured outputs, I noticed something strange. Almost every tutorial, course,...
🔓 Beyond the Filter: Understanding Universal Jailbreaks in Agentic AI
Dev.to · Alessandro Pignati ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
🔓 Beyond the Filter: Understanding Universal Jailbreaks in Agentic AI
In the world of LLMs, we’ve all seen the "classic" jailbreaks—those clever, human-written prompts...
5 Python Scripts That Automate Your Freelance Workflow With AI
Dev.to · klement Gunndu ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
5 Python Scripts That Automate Your Freelance Workflow With AI
Freelancers spend 10+ hours a week on admin. These 5 Python scripts use OpenAI structured outputs to automate proposals, reports, invoices, emails, and scope do
Top 5 Structured Output Libraries for LLMs in 2026
Dev.to · Nebula ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Top 5 Structured Output Libraries for LLMs in 2026
Compare the top structured output libraries for LLMs -- Instructor, PydanticAI, Outlines, Guidance, and Zod. Side-by-side on features, approach, and best use.
Context Engineering for AI Agents: A Practical Guide
Dev.to · Nebula ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Context Engineering for AI Agents: A Practical Guide
Learn 4 context engineering strategies for AI agents with runnable Python code. Budget your context window, compress history, and inject tools dynamically.
What Changed When I Started Prompting AI Properly
Dev.to · Margarita Titova ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
What Changed When I Started Prompting AI Properly
Most QA engineers who try AI and conclude "it's not that useful" are right, but for the wrong...
5,800 Lines of Code From Zero: How I Bootstrapped a Full Pipeline With AI in One Day
Dev.to · jidonglab ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
5,800 Lines of Code From Zero: How I Bootstrapped a Full Pipeline With AI in One Day
Saju-to-video pipeline. 4 commits. Architecture → scaffold → review → ship. The prompting pattern that kept 5,800 lines coherent.
The gap in AI agent security nobody talks about: your .env is already in the context window
Dev.to · Trevor ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
The gap in AI agent security nobody talks about: your .env is already in the context window
Your AI coding agent just read your .env file. Not on purpose. You asked it to fix a bug in your...
Reliable AI Outputs: Function Calling, JSON Mode, and Structured Generation in C#
Dev.to · Brian Spann ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Reliable AI Outputs: Function Calling, JSON Mode, and Structured Generation in C#
LLMs are impressive text generators, but production applications need more than prose. You need...
I Built a Prompt Engineering Suite for Developers — Here's Why Generic AI Prompts Are Killing Your Code Quality
Dev.to · AKSHAY P ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
I Built a Prompt Engineering Suite for Developers — Here's Why Generic AI Prompts Are Killing Your Code Quality
I'll be honest with you — I was spending more time writing prompts than actually writing...
What Building AI in Healthcare Taught Me About Engineering Discipline
Dev.to · Jamie Gray ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
What Building AI in Healthcare Taught Me About Engineering Discipline
When people talk about AI, the conversation usually goes straight to model quality, prompt design, or...
SurfaceDocs + OpenAI Agents SDK: Structured Output to Shareable Docs
Dev.to · SurfaceDocs ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
SurfaceDocs + OpenAI Agents SDK: Structured Output to Shareable Docs
Give your AI agents a proper output surface. Integrate the OpenAI Agents SDK with SurfaceDocs to turn structured agent output into shareable documents with zero
Power Your Azure AI Agents: Function Calling, Code Interpreter, and File Search
Dev.to · Brian Spann ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Power Your Azure AI Agents: Function Calling, Code Interpreter, and File Search
Power Your Azure AI Agents: Function Calling, Code Interpreter, and File Search In Part 1,...
5 Prompt Engineering Patterns That Actually Work in Production
Dev.to · klement Gunndu ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
5 Prompt Engineering Patterns That Actually Work in Production
Most prompt guides teach chat tricks. These 5 patterns solve real production problems — with working Python code for each.
Prompt Engineering as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Restructuring Thoughts by Restructuring Queries to Self
Dev.to · VelocityAI ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Prompt Engineering as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Restructuring Thoughts by Restructuring Queries to Self
You wake up in the middle of the night, mind racing. "What if I fail? What if everything goes wrong?...
How I strip 90% of code before feeding it to my coding agent
Dev.to · Dean Sharon ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
How I strip 90% of code before feeding it to my coding agent
Context windows keep growing. 200k tokens. A million. The assumption is that bigger windows mean...
What I Unlearned About Prompt Engineering After Actually Shipping With It
Dev.to · v. Splicer ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
What I Unlearned About Prompt Engineering After Actually Shipping With It
The first version went live at 2:17 a.m. Not a launch party. Not a thread. Not a cinematic build in...
Why You Should Stop Prompting (And Start Scaffolding)
Dev.to · Kyle Anderson ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
Why You Should Stop Prompting (And Start Scaffolding)
For the last year, developers have been obsessed with building the "perfect prompt." A 5,000-word...
The Network Learns: When Training AI Becomes a Global Feedback System
Dev.to · Michael Kraft ✍️ Prompt Engineering 3mo ago
The Network Learns: When Training AI Becomes a Global Feedback System
Why prompt engineering is starting to look less like programming — and more like education at planetary scale.
Did that actually help? Evaluating AI coding assistants with hard numbers
Dev.to · Daniel Butler ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Did that actually help? Evaluating AI coding assistants with hard numbers
You are building a Skill, an MCP server, or a custom prompt strategy that is supposed to make an AI...
Prompt Engineering is Dead: The Rise of Autonomous AI Processes by 2026
Dev.to · Manikandan Mariappan ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Prompt Engineering is Dead: The Rise of Autonomous AI Processes by 2026
Introduction Stop obsessing over your "System Prompt." Seriously. If your current AI...
Your Prompts Don't Have Tests. That's a Problem.
Dev.to · Ed ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Your Prompts Don't Have Tests. That's a Problem.
Nobody knows when a prompt got worse. I mean that literally. A teammate tweaks a system prompt on...
Structured Output with Claude: Extracting Data from Unstructured Text
Dev.to · albert nahas ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Structured Output with Claude: Extracting Data from Unstructured Text
Learn how to extract structured JSON data from unstructured text using Claude with effective prompting patterns. Start improving your data extraction now!
Pre-Prompting Technologies: The Ouija Board, the Oracle at Delphi, and the Long History of Consulting Non-Human Intelligences
Dev.to · VelocityAI ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Pre-Prompting Technologies: The Ouija Board, the Oracle at Delphi, and the Long History of Consulting Non-Human Intelligences
You sit before a glowing screen. You formulate a question with care, choosing each word for maximum...
Advanced Prompt Engineering: From Zero-Shot to Self-Consistency
Dev.to · Brayan Arrieta ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Advanced Prompt Engineering: From Zero-Shot to Self-Consistency
Prompt engineering has moved beyond “ask a question, get an answer.” In real applications, we often...
You Don’t Need a Bigger Model — You Need a Stable One
Dev.to · Cloyou ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
You Don’t Need a Bigger Model — You Need a Stable One
Every few months, a new model drops. More parameters. Longer context windows. Better...
How to Implement Prompt Caching on Amazon Bedrock and Cut Inference Costs in Half
Dev.to · Sachin m ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
How to Implement Prompt Caching on Amazon Bedrock and Cut Inference Costs in Half
Add one line of code to stop reprocessing static system prompts on every API call. Real benchmarks across 3 Nova models — 49% savings with caching alone, 97% wh
Prompting Is Not Engineering: Building Reliable LLM Production Systems with Control Layers
Dev.to · Adaka Ankita ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Prompting Is Not Engineering: Building Reliable LLM Production Systems with Control Layers
Learn the 4 control layers that make LLM systems reliable in production—beyond prompt engineering
Technical Deep Dive: Veo 3.1 JSON Prompt Engineering
Dev.to · Solo Dev ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Technical Deep Dive: Veo 3.1 JSON Prompt Engineering
Why Your Natural Language Prompts Are Breaking (And How JSON Fixes It) I've spent the last...
I Built an Open-Source Immune System for LLMs That Detects Jailbreaks in 3ms — Here's What I Found Auditing Lakera Guard
Dev.to · Dmitry Labintcev ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
I Built an Open-Source Immune System for LLMs That Detects Jailbreaks in 3ms — Here's What I Found Auditing Lakera Guard
description: "How a swarm of tiny ML models (<8K parameters total) outperforms BERT at jailbreak...
Implementing A/B Testing for Prompts in LangChain
Dev.to · Harish Kotra (he/him) ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Implementing A/B Testing for Prompts in LangChain
Prompt engineering requires constant iteration. A common pattern is to have a "Production Prompt" and...
Laravel AI SDK Tutorial: Build a Smart Assistant in 30 Minutes
Dev.to · Hafiz ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Laravel AI SDK Tutorial: Build a Smart Assistant in 30 Minutes
Laravel AI SDK tutorial with step-by-step code examples. Build a document analyzer agent with structured output, streaming, and testing in 30 minutes.
🔙 STEP-BACK Prompting Technique
Dev.to · Vignesh Ambalam Suresh ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
🔙 STEP-BACK Prompting Technique
Step-back prompting is a technique developed by Google DeepMind where instead of directly tackling a...
My AI agent pushed directly to main. The system prompt said don't.
Dev.to · Arnold Cartagena ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
My AI agent pushed directly to main. The system prompt said don't.
I was demoing my AI agent to colleagues. The agent had access to Git tooling, and my carefully...
Laravel AI SDK: What It Changes, Why It Matters, and Should You Use It?
Dev.to · Hafiz ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
Laravel AI SDK: What It Changes, Why It Matters, and Should You Use It?
Laravel AI SDK deep dive with real code comparisons. See how it replaces openai-php and Prism with first-party agents, streaming, and structured output.
OpenAI Just Got "Swarmed": Kimi k2.5 and the Death of the Single Agent
Dev.to · Siddhesh Surve ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
OpenAI Just Got "Swarmed": Kimi k2.5 and the Death of the Single Agent
Forget "Chain of Thought." The new meta is "Chain of Agents." And it’s running locally. If you...
AWS Bedrock vs. SageMaker: Choosing the Right GenAI Stack in 2026
Dev.to · Jubin Soni ✍️ Prompt Engineering 4mo ago
AWS Bedrock vs. SageMaker: Choosing the Right GenAI Stack in 2026
By 2026, the landscape of Generative AI has shifted from simple prompt engineering to complex agentic...
Multimodal Prompting: The Next Frontier-How to Juggle Text, Images, and Files in a Single Request
Dev.to · VelocityAI ✍️ Prompt Engineering 5mo ago
Multimodal Prompting: The Next Frontier-How to Juggle Text, Images, and Files in a Single Request
Until now, working with AI felt like having separate, brilliant specialists in soundproof rooms. You...