Prompting Principles and Techniques

Module 5, Lecture 5.1 | Section 3: Prompt and Context Engineering

Modules 2–4 built a mental model of how LLMs work: next-token predictors, trained on internet text, shaped by RLHF. This lecture puts that model to work. Prompting is not a collection of magic phrases — it is an applied discipline grounded in how models process context. The principles covered here — clarity, positive framing, structure, chain-of-thought, and treating prompts as versioned code — apply directly to agent development, where prompt failures are not annoyances but bugs.

Read the full lecture narrative

Additional Resources

• Lecture slides

Prompting (General)

• Claude Prompting Best Practices — Anthropic Docs — Anthropic's authoritative prompting reference covering clarity, XML structure, output formatting, and agentic use. Direct complement to this lecture.
• Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial — Anthropic (GitHub) — Anthropic's 9-chapter hands-on tutorial with exercises for students who want to practice beyond the lecture.

Chain-of-Thought

• Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models — Wei et al., 2022 — The original CoT paper. Demonstrates that step-by-step reasoning dramatically improves performance on math, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning benchmarks.
• Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners — Kojima et al., 2022 — Establishes that "Let's think step by step" works zero-shot, with no few-shot examples required.
• Extended Thinking — Anthropic Docs — Claude's extended thinking API — the same CoT mechanism with a hidden reasoning block. Directly relevant for students building agents with Claude.
• Chain-of-Thought — Prompt Engineering Guide — Accessible overview of standard CoT, zero-shot CoT, and Auto-CoT. Good first read alongside the original papers.

XML

• What is XML? — W3Schools — One-page intro: what XML is, what tags are, and how elements are structured. Good first read for students who haven't encountered XML before.
• XML Syntax Rules — W3Schools — Covers proper nesting, closing tags, case sensitivity, and well-formedness — the mechanics that matter for understanding XML-style tags in prompts.
• XML Introduction — MDN Web Docs — Mozilla's authoritative XML intro for students who want more depth.

Markdown

• Basic Syntax — Markdown Guide — The most thorough beginner reference for Markdown, covering headers, lists, code blocks, and links with rendered examples.
• Cheat Sheet — Markdown Guide — Compact one-page summary of all common Markdown syntax. Best as a quick lookup during the lab.
• CommonMark Help — Interactive reference for CommonMark, the standardized Markdown spec used by GitHub and others.