Prompt Engineering

Learning objectives

• Apply the structured, example-driven prompting patterns from Anthropic's interactive tutorial to a Reddit task.
• Write a Reddit-specific system prompt using explicit role, context, and few-shot examples.
• Distinguish when a Reddit task needs few-shot examples versus a clean zero-shot instruction.
• Draft prompts that explicitly preserve the "draft, not send" constraint at the instruction level, not just the Project level.
• Identify prompt patterns to avoid because they read as manipulation-adjacent rather than assistance.

Prerequisites: Lesson 6.1.1.

Core concepts

Everything in this stage sits on top of prompt engineering fundamentals, and Anthropic ships a genuinely complete free curriculum for it: the Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial is nine chapters plus an advanced-methods appendix, each ending in a hands-on "Example Playground" (github.com/anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutorial). Work through it once as general practice, then re-apply every technique specifically to Reddit tasks, because generic marketing-copy prompting and Reddit-thread prompting behave differently, a Reddit reply has to survive a moderator's judgment and a stranger's skepticism, not a brand-safe review process.

The single highest-leverage technique for this course is few-shot prompting with real (anonymized) thread examples. Instead of instructing Claude abstractly to "score buying intent," feed it three or four real thread excerpts from your Stage 4 monitoring log, each labeled with the score and reasoning a human already assigned, then ask it to score a new batch the same way. This anchors Claude's judgment to your team's actual standard rather than a generic notion of "buying intent," and it is the same mechanism Stage 4 asked you to build informally with a single "intent-classifier" prompt, now formalized with a proper example bank.

<role>You are a Reddit-ops research assistant for {{company_name}}.</role>
<context>
Below are three thread excerpts we already scored, with reasoning, from
our Stage 4 monitoring log:
{{labeled_example_1}}
{{labeled_example_2}}
{{labeled_example_3}}
</context>
<task>
Score this new thread on the same 0-100 buying-intent scale, using the
same reasoning style. Do not draft a reply yet, scoring only.
{{new_thread_text}}
</task>

Two habits keep prompt engineering from drifting toward the black-hat tactics Stage 4 already ruled out. First, never instruct Claude to write a reply "as if" it were a satisfied customer, a neutral third party, or anyone other than your own disclosed account, that instruction alone is the seed of the undisclosed-astroturfing pattern this course forbids. Second, every prompt that produces text destined for Reddit should contain an explicit, literal instruction that the output is a draft for human review, even though the Project-level instructions from Lesson 6.1.1 already say so, redundancy here is a feature, not a mistake, because a single prompt can be copied out of the Project context and reused elsewhere without that guardrail attached.

Video lessons

Supporting reading

• anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutorial (GitHub) (https://github.com/anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutorial), the ready-made, nine-chapter curriculum this lesson's exercise is built directly on top of.
• Anthropic Academy, Courses (Skilljar) (https://anthropic.skilljar.com/), the AI Fluency track covers prompting fundamentals with a free certificate, worth pairing with the GitHub tutorial.

Exercise

Work through at least three chapters of Anthropic's interactive tutorial. Then build the few-shot intent-scoring prompt above using three real threads from your own Stage 4 monitoring log.

Assignment

Submit your finished few-shot intent-scoring prompt, plus a one-paragraph note on one prompting mistake you caught yourself making (vague instruction, missing draft-only reminder, or an "act as if" framing) and how you fixed it.

Claude workflow

• Skill idea: a "prompt-linter" skill that scans any drafted prompt for missing draft-only language or "act as if you are a customer" framing before it's saved to the library.
• Automation: none, prompt authorship stays a human exercise in this lesson; automation begins once the prompt graduates into a Skill in Module 6.2.

Expected outcomes

• Three tutorial chapters completed with playground exercises attempted.
• A working few-shot intent-scoring prompt, tested against at least five new threads.
• Can explain, from memory, why "act as if you are a customer" is a forbidden prompt pattern.