prompt-engineering

Guidance for writing and testing instructions for software that uses large language models, so the models return consistent results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building or debugging model features such as extraction, classification, generation, or agent workflows.
Why use it?
It reduces ambiguous outputs by defining the task, constraints, examples, and exact response format clearly.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/phuonghx/aim-cli/prompt-engineering
Any agent
npx skills add phuonghx/aim-cli --skill prompt-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/phuonghx/aim-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,557 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00079 $0.01557
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00779
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00311
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00156

Measured yesterday against content hash c74c54591a61, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

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.

aim/templates/aim-agents/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineering

Treat prompts as code: explicit, structured, versioned, and tested.

Core principles

  • Be explicit, not clever. State the task, constraints, and output format directly. The model cannot read intent you did not write.
  • Show the shape of success. A correct example beats a paragraph of description.
  • Separate the stable from the variable. Put fixed rules in the system prompt; inject per-request data in the user turn.
  • Constrain the output. Define the exact format you will parse. Unconstrained prose is unparseable.
  • One job per prompt. If a prompt does extraction and summarization and routing, split it.

Anatomy of a production prompt

Section Purpose Goes in
Role / persona Set domain + tone System
Task instruction What to do, imperatively System
Rules / constraints Hard limits, do/don't System
Output schema Exact format to return System
Few-shot examples Demonstrate edge cases System
Input data The thing to process User

Clear instructions checklist

  • Task stated as an imperative ("Extract...", "Classify...", not "Can you...").
  • Audience and tone specified if it matters.
  • Edge cases named: empty input, ambiguous input, no valid answer.
  • An explicit escape hatch: what to output when the model cannot comply (e.g. {"error": "insufficient_context"}).
  • Ordering matters — put the most important constraint first and last (models weight both ends).

Role / system prompts

Set durable behavior once, not per request.

You are a support-ticket triage engine for a B2B SaaS product.
You classify tickets and never address the customer directly.
You only ever return JSON matching the schema. No prose, no apologies.

Keep the role functional ("triage engine") over theatrical ("world-class expert"). Function drives behavior; flattery does not.

Delimiter / XML structuring

Wrap distinct parts in named tags so the model never confuses instructions with data. This also blunts prompt injection from user content.

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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. yesterday First seen · 158 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A c74c54591a61

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository phuonghx/aim-cli (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,557 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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