prompt-engineer

prompt-engineer is a skill for Claude Code from Jeffallan/claude-skills. It costs 93 tokens per session (1,193 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing and improving instructions given to language models. It covers prompt templates, structured answers such as JSON, evaluation criteria, test cases, and troubleshooting inconsistent results.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for designing prompts, refining existing ones, testing model outputs, adding safeguards, and moving prompts between AI models or providers.
Why use it?
It helps make AI instructions clearer, more reliable, and easier to evaluate.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the fullstack-dev-skills plugin — 57 skills shipped together

not rated 11krepo +90 1mo ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 93 tokens original MIT

Good fit It is for designing prompts, refining existing ones, testing model outputs, adding safeguards, and moving prompts between AI models or providers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer
About the project

claude-skills is a collection of specialized skills that extends Claude Code for full-stack development. Developers use it for programming languages, frameworks, infrastructure, APIs, testing, DevOps, security, data and machine learning, platform tasks, and project workflows.

Jeffallan/claude-skills · 11,439 stars · on GitHub

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 Jeffallan/claude-skills --skill prompt-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install fullstack-dev-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills.

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-engineer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer/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-engineer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffallan/claude-skills/prompt-engineer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,193 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 29 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 29 Apr 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00093 $0.01193
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00596
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00239
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00119

Measured 13d ago against content hash 1ab0f43e1c6d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-engineer 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 13d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/prompt-engineer/SKILL.md · 137 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 137 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineer

Expert prompt engineer specializing in designing, optimizing, and evaluating prompts that maximize LLM performance across diverse use cases.

When to Use This Skill

  • Designing prompts for new LLM applications
  • Optimizing existing prompts for better accuracy or efficiency
  • Implementing chain-of-thought or few-shot learning
  • Creating system prompts with personas and guardrails
  • Building structured output schemas (JSON mode, function calling)
  • Developing prompt evaluation and testing frameworks
  • Debugging inconsistent or poor-quality LLM outputs
  • Migrating prompts between different models or providers

Core Workflow

  1. Understand requirements — Define task, success criteria, constraints, and edge cases
  2. Design initial prompt — Choose pattern (zero-shot, few-shot, CoT), write clear instructions
  3. Test and evaluate — Run diverse test cases, measure quality metrics
    • Validation checkpoint: If accuracy < 80% on the test set, identify failure patterns before iterating (e.g., ambiguous instructions, missing examples, edge case gaps)
  4. Iterate and optimize — Make one change at a time; refine based on failures, reduce tokens, improve reliability
  5. Document and deploy — Version prompts, document behavior, monitor production

Reference Guide

Load detailed guidance based on context:

Topic Reference Load When
Prompt Patterns references/prompt-patterns.md Zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, ReAct
Optimization references/prompt-optimization.md Iterative refinement, A/B testing, token reduction
Evaluation references/evaluation-frameworks.md Metrics, test suites, automated evaluation
Structured Outputs references/structured-outputs.md JSON mode, function calling, schema design
System Prompts references/system-prompts.md Persona design, guardrails, injection defense
Context Management references/context-management.md Attention budget, degradation patterns, context optimization

Read the full file on GitHub · 137 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 13d ago First seen · 137 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 1ab0f43e1c6d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineer is a skill published in the GitHub repository Jeffallan/claude-skills (11,439 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,193 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.

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