prompt-engineering

prompt-engineering is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from fabioc-aloha/Alex_Skill_Mall. It costs 16 tokens per session (2,083 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to writing instructions for language models so they produce more useful and consistent results. It covers prompts, examples, context, tasks, and output formats.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write prompts for coding, reviews, classification, structured output, and other language-model tasks.
Why use it?
Vague instructions often lead to incomplete or poorly formatted answers. It helps make model behavior more predictable.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to write prompts for coding, reviews, classification, structured output, and other language-model tasks.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add fabioc-aloha/Alex_Skill_Mall --skill prompt-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fabioc-aloha/Alex_Skill_Mall

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for prompt-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for prompt-engineering

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fabioc-aloha/alex_skill_mall/prompt-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,083 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00016 $0.02083
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.01042
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00417
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00208

Measured 6d ago against content hash 822fd895a687, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-engineering scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/ai-agents/prompt-engineering/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · 357 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 357 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineering Skill

Craft effective prompts that get the best results from language models.

Core Principle

Prompts are programming for probabilistic systems. Clear instructions, good examples, and structured output formats dramatically improve results.

Prompt Anatomy

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SYSTEM PROMPT (Role & Constraints)      │
│ "You are a senior code reviewer..."     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ CONTEXT (Background Information)        │
│ "The codebase uses TypeScript..."       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ EXAMPLES (Few-Shot Learning)            │
│ Input: X → Output: Y                    │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ TASK (What to Do)                       │
│ "Review this pull request for..."       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ FORMAT (Output Structure)               │
│ "Respond in JSON with fields..."        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Prompting Techniques

Zero-Shot

Direct instruction without examples:

Classify this customer feedback as positive, negative, or neutral:
"The product arrived late but works great."

Best for: Simple, well-defined tasks the model understands.

Few-Shot

Provide examples to demonstrate the pattern:

Classify customer feedback:

Input: "Love it! Best purchase ever!"
Output: positive

Input: "Broken on arrival. Waste of money."
Output: negative

Input: "The product arrived late but works great."
Output: ?

Best for: Nuanced tasks, custom formats, domain-specific patterns.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT)

Ask the model to think step-by-step:

Solve this problem. Think through it step by step before giving your answer.

A store has 45 apples. They sell 12 in the morning and receive a shipment of 30.
How many apples do they have?

Let's think step by step:
1. Start with 45 apples
2. Sell 12: 45 - 12 = 33
3. Receive 30: 33 + 30 = 63

Answer: 63 apples

Read the full file on GitHub · 357 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 357 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 822fd895a687

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository fabioc-aloha/Alex_Skill_Mall (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 2,083 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.