Free Prompt Engineering Course

Prompt engineering has gone from a curious hobby to a serious skill that AI engineers, product managers, and researchers all need. This free course covers everything from the basics of crafting effective prompts to advanced techniques like chain-of-thought reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows.

What is prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting inputs to language models to reliably get the outputs you need. It's part art, part science. At the basic level it's about wording instructions clearly. At the advanced level it's about structuring multi-step reasoning chains, injecting context from external databases, and designing systems where multiple models or agents collaborate. As LLMs become infrastructure, knowing how to use them precisely is as fundamental as knowing how to write a SQL query.

Course curriculum

Foundations of prompting

How LLMs process tokens, why phrasing matters, and the basic mental model for writing good prompts.

Zero-shot and few-shot prompting

Getting results without examples vs. providing examples to guide the model's behavior and format.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning

Making models reason step by step to improve accuracy on complex tasks. When to use it and how.

Structured output and tool use

Getting models to return JSON, call functions, and integrate with code reliably.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Connecting language models to external knowledge sources so answers stay grounded and up to date.

Agentic AI systems

Building systems where the model plans, uses tools, and takes multi-step actions to complete goals.

Who should take this course?

If you're already on the AI Engineer Roadmap, prompt engineering is one of the most immediately applicable skills — you can use it while still learning the fundamentals. It's also useful for developers who want to add AI features to their applications without a full ML background, and for anyone working closely with LLMs in their role.

Pair this with the resources library for deep-dive material on specific models and APIs. When you're ready for the job market, check the interview questions — prompting and LLMs come up in most AI engineering interviews today. Browse open AI/ML jobs to see what companies are hiring for.

Start the AI Engineer Roadmap