prompt-engineering

prompt-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills. It costs 67 tokens per session (3,920 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A practical guide to writing instructions for large language models, the systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and AI agents. It covers prompt structure, examples, output formats, tools, and debugging.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, write, test, or debug prompts for AI agents and other applications that use language models.
Why use it?
It helps make model instructions specific and predictable, reducing invented details, incorrect formats, and poorly handled tasks.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the agent-dev-skills plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to design, write, test, or debug prompts for AI agents and other applications that use language models.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-dev-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/prompt-engineering/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/prompt-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/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/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills/prompt-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,920 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 $0.00067 $0.03920
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01960
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00784
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00392

Measured 10d ago against content hash b2650d1b08a7, 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 10d 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/agent-dev-skills/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineering — a working reference

Sources: the DeepLearning.AI course "ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers" (the base) + Anthropic's guides "Prompting best practices" / "Effective context engineering" + current OpenAI GPT-5.x prompting guides (5.5, April 2026: "re-baseline your prompts for the new model, don't drag along your old prescriptive stack") + Anthropic's essay "Building Effective Agents" + practice. Updated as I learn.

The core intuition: the model doesn't read minds (whatever isn't stated explicitly, it will either invent or NOT do) and the model only "thinks" in what it prints (there's no internal scratchpad — the reasoning tokens are the thinking).

Reference files alongside this one (read them as needed, not always): PATTERNS.md — reasoning models, reasoning patterns (ReAct, Reflexion, CoVe…), formatting (CAPS/markdown/emoji), curing a bloated prompt; EVAL-JUDGE.md — evals, the iterative loop, LLM-as-judge, DSPy; TOOLS.md — tooling (Console, Promptfoo, Langfuse…).


Principle 1 — clear, specific instructions ("clear" ≠ "short")

  • Delimiters / XML tags. Any extraneous text (input data, examples, context documents) goes in delimiters: ```, """, < >, :::, XML tags (preferred for complex prompts). Why: (a) the model can tell where the instruction ends and the data begins; (b) protection against prompt injection — text inside a block is treated as data, not as a command. Use consistent, meaningful tag names (<instructions>, <context>, <input>, <example>); nest them for hierarchy (<documents><document index="1">…).
  • Numbered steps when order or completeness of steps matters.
  • Structured output. If the result feeds code — specify the format explicitly. See "Modern standards → Structured Outputs."
  • Condition checks. If an assumption might not hold, have the model check and say so ("if there are no steps — reply 'No steps found'") instead of inventing.
  • Context helps. Explain who/what the result is for — the model calibrates tone, level of detail, and vocabulary.
  • Don't leave the model freedom where you have requirements. Edge cases, what counts as what — spell them out.

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 10d ago First seen · 159 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A b2650d1b08a7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository kirill-sviridov/agent-dev-skills (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 3,920 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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