prompt-engineering

prompt-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill. It costs 114 tokens per session (3,347 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guidance skill for designing, improving, testing, and securing prompts and system instructions for AI models.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for prompt writing, system-prompt architecture, agent and tool instructions, prompt optimisation, security reviews, versioning, monitoring, and regression testing.
Why use it?
It helps address unclear model instructions, inconsistent outputs, prompt-injection risks, and changes that are difficult to evaluate. It covers both individual prompts and larger instruction structures for agents using tools.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the prompt-engineering plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it for prompt writing, system-prompt architecture, agent and tool instructions, prompt optimisation, security reviews, versioning, monitoring, and regression testing.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/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 hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill --skill prompt-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install prompt-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/prompt-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/prompt-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/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/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill/prompt-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,347 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 $0.00114 $0.03347
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01673
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00669
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00335

Measured 12d ago against content hash 64392aa073d7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, 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 12d 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.

skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · 389 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 389 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineering

Expert guidance for designing, optimizing, evaluating, and securing prompts for LLMs. Patterns derived from production agentic systems (Claude Code) and the prompt engineering research landscape.

Core Capabilities

  1. Core Prompting Techniques - Reasoning, structured output, few-shot, constraint injection
  2. System Prompt Architecture - Modular section-builders, static/dynamic boundaries, caching
  3. Agent & Tool Integration - Agent specialization, tool-aware prompts, tiered permissions
  4. Prompt Optimization & Automation - APE, DSPy, EvoPrompt, compression, A/B testing
  5. Security & Robustness - Injection defense, instruction hierarchy, Constitutional AI
  6. Evaluation & Benchmarking - Assertion-based, model-graded, regression testing
  7. Production Best Practices - Prompt-as-code, versioning, monitoring, anti-patterns

For deep dives, see the references/ directory linked from each section below.


1. Core Prompting Techniques

Full catalog: See references/techniques-catalog.md for all 58+ techniques with examples.

Reasoning Amplification
  • Chain of Thought (CoT): Add "Let's think step by step" or provide worked examples. Best for math, logic, multi-step reasoning.
  • Tree of Thoughts (ToT): Explore multiple reasoning branches, evaluate and prune. Use for planning, creative tasks, or problems with dead ends.
  • Self-Consistency: Sample multiple CoT paths, take majority vote. Improves reliability at cost of latency.
  • ReAct (Reason + Act): Interleave reasoning traces with tool calls. Foundation of agentic prompting.
Structured Output
  • XML tagging: Wrap sections in <analysis>, <result>, <examples> tags for clear structure. Anthropic's recommended approach.
  • JSON mode: Constrain output to valid JSON schemas for API consumption.
  • Markdown formatting: Use headers, lists, code blocks for human-readable structured output.
Few-Shot & Exemplars

Read the full file on GitHub · 389 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 12d ago First seen · 389 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A 64392aa073d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository hardness1020/awesome-prompt-skill (4 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 3,347 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.

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