Prompt Engineering for Developers: The Definitive Guide

Master core prompt engineering techniques and advanced patters to build real-world AI-powered solutions and automations

What you'll learn

• Understand core LLM mechanics like tokenization and context windows to build efficient and cost-effective solutions.
• Apply advanced prompt engineering patterns like Persona, Chain of Thought, and Self-Critique to solve complex problems.
• Engineer prompts that ensure reliable, machine-readable output formats like JSON for use in automated systems.
• Implement function calling to allow your AI application to execute external tools like linters and security scanners.
• Calculate and manage API costs for complex, multi-turn AI conversations and workflows.
• Write provider-agnostic code with LiteLLM that can seamlessly switch between OpenAI, Anthropic, and local models.
• Leverage AI coding agents like GitHub Copilot to accelerate your software development workflow from scaffolding to testing.
• Build a complete, AI-powered CLI tool from scratch that generates smart commit messages and performs code reviews.
• Write comprehensive unit tests for AI-integrated code by effectively mocking external API calls and user input.

Requirements

• Familiarity with Python programming and its ecosystem (pip, virtual environments).
• Hands-on experience with Git for version control (add, commit, diff).

Description

Welcome to Prompt Engineering for Developers: The Definitive Guide!

Are you ready to take your Prompt Engineering and Generative AI skills to the next level? This Prompt Engineering course is crafted to help you build confidence and expertise, ensuring you go beyond chatting with Large Language Models, and start engineering real-world, effective AI solutions.

Why Learn Prompt Engineering?

Generative AI is no longer a novelty; it is a foundational layer of modern software development. Prompt Engineering is the discipline that transforms this powerful technology from a simple assistant into a reliable, automated engine for solving complex engineering problems.

• Drastically Increase Your Efficiency and Productivity: Well-crafted prompts are the ultimate automation tool for a developer's workflow. By learning to effectively instruct a Large Language Model, you can automate complex and time-consuming tasks like writing documentation, generating test cases, performing initial code reviews, and creating detailed commit messages. This allows you to streamline your processes, eliminate repetitive work, and focus on the high-impact problems that truly matter.
• Build Truly Intelligent Tools: Go beyond simple scripts that just generate text. Learn to build sophisticated systems that can perform multi-step reasoning, analyze complex data, and interact with external APIs and tools through function calling. This is the future of building internal tooling and developer-centric automation.
• Sharpen Your Problem-Solving and System Design Skills: Crafting effective prompts is also a problem-solving exercise. This process of deconstruction forces you to think critically about the task, the necessary context, and the required constraints. This not only dramatically improves the AI's results but also sharpens your own analytical and system design abilities, making you a better engineer.
• Unlock Career Advancement with a High-Demand Skill: As Generative AI becomes deeply integrated into every stage of the Software Development lifecycle, the demand for engineers who can reliably harness its power is exploding. Mastering Prompt Engineering sets you apart, transitioning you from a user of AI to an architect of AI-powered systems. This competency is a significant career multiplier, opening up new opportunities and making you an indispensable leader in your field.

Why Choose This Prompt Engineering Course?

While many resources show you how to chat with an AI, this course teaches you how to engineer with one. It is built by an engineer, for engineers, with a relentless focus on the practical challenges of building production-ready AI solutions.

• Project-Based, Not Just Theory: You will not just learn patterns in isolation; you will apply them to build a complete, functional AI-powered CLI tool from scratch. Every concept, from basic API calls to advanced reasoning patterns, is immediately put into practice in a real-world software development project.
• An Engineering-First Approach: Prompts are a core component of a larger software system. You will learn to write comprehensive unit tests for AI workflows, refactor your code for maintainability, and handle structured data to build robust, machine-readable pipelines - skills you won't find in a generic prompt writing course.
• A Professional Toolkit of Reusable Patterns: This course provides a battle-tested toolkit of advanced strategies - Persona, Chain-of-Thought, Decomposition, Self-Critique, and many more - that are directly applicable to engineering tasks. You will leave with a set of reusable patterns that empower you to solve any complex problem with confidence.
• Deep Understanding of LLM Mechanics: To build efficient and cost-effective applications, you need to understand the machine. We dive deep into the core concepts of tokenization, the context window, and API cost management, ensuring you have the knowledge to build solutions that are not only intelligent but also optimized for production.

What You'll Learn in This Course

By the end of this course, you will have a comprehensive and valuable set of Prompt Engineering skills, enabling you to architect and build sophisticated Generative AI solutions for Software Development. You will learn to:

• Master the Foundational Prompting Framework: Structure every prompt with clear Instruction, Context, and Constraints. This core principle is the most critical skill for getting reliable, predictable, and high-quality results from any Large Language Model.
• Create Expert AI Assistants with the Persona Pattern: Go beyond generic responses by instructing the model to act as a "Senior Cloud Architect," a "skeptical Security Analyst," or an "expert DBA." You'll learn to combine the Persona with specific Behavioral Rules to tailor the AI's knowledge, tone, and analysis to your exact needs.
• Unlock Deeper Reasoning with Advanced Logic Patterns: Force the AI to move beyond shallow answers. You will master patterns like Chain-of-Thought, Decomposition, and Self-Critique to solve complex multi-step problems, ensuring the AI provides thorough, well-reasoned solutions.
• Engineer Crystal-Clear, Machine-Parsable Prompts and Responses: Structure is everything in automation. You'll use advanced Delimiters (like Markdown and XML) and the Template Pattern to create prompts that are unambiguous to the AI and to force its output into a predictable, structured format like JSON.
• Bridge the Gap Between AI and Your Tools with Function Calling: Make your AI an active agent in your workflows. You will learn to define and expose your own Python functions as "tools" that the Generative AI can decide to call, enabling it to run linters, security scanners, or any other external process.
• Design Interactive and Collaborative AI Workflows: Transform the AI from a simple instruction-follower into a proactive partner. You'll implement the Flip the Script pattern to make the AI ask you clarifying questions and use an iterative feedback loop to refine AI-generated content with natural language.
• Generate Superior, High-Quality Outputs with Advanced Techniques: Learn the secrets to getting the best possible response. You'll apply the Self-Consistency pattern to brainstorm multiple diverse solutions and synthesize a superior final version, and use Few-Shot Prompting to teach the model nuanced behavior through examples.
• Use AI to Engineer Better Prompts (Meta-Prompting): Take your skills to the next level by using one AI to help you build prompts for another. You'll use the Prompt Generator pattern to create a "master prompt" that interactively helps you craft highly-optimized prompts for any task.

And much more! Get ready to elevate your Generative AI game, master Prompt Engineering, and become the 10x developer that everyone is always talking about. Let’s embark on this journey together!

Who this course is for:

• Any developer or technical professional aiming to drastically increase their effectiveness when working with Generative AI.
• DevOps Engineers, SREs, and Software Developers looking to build custom AI-powered automation and tooling.
• Engineers who want to move beyond basic AI chatbots and build reliable, production-ready, and testable solutions.
• Platform and Tooling teams tasked with creating intelligent internal developer tools to boost productivity.
• Technical professionals aiming to become leaders in the practical application of Generative AI for engineering challenges.