claude-scaffold: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md

prompt-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold. It costs 0 tokens per session (859 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for creating and evaluating prompts: the instructions given to an AI model. It covers system prompts, examples that show the desired answers, reasoning-related prompt patterns, templates, and structured output formats.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design system prompts, few-shot examples, prompt templates, and evaluations for AI responses.
Why use it?
It helps make AI instructions clearer and more consistent, especially when the model must return a specific format or follow examples.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

This is pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on claude-scaffold itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything claude-scaffold configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold/main/.claude/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold

Made for: Claude Code.

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
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Your own site
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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/pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold/prompt-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold/prompt-engineering.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 859 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 $0.00000 $0.00859
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00430
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00172
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00086

Measured 9d ago against content hash b52ed89867ff, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, 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 9d 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.

.claude/skills/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · 140 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Engineering

When to Load This Skill

Load when working with: system prompts, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought, prompt templates, system_prompt, few_shot, prompt evaluation, "промпт", CoT, output formatting, structured output.

System Prompt Structure

A production system prompt has four sections:

## Role
Who Claude is in this context.

## Context
What the system is, what data Claude has access to, key constraints.

## Task
What Claude must do. Be specific — avoid "help the user".

## Output Format
Exact format of the response. Include examples.

Keep system prompts under 2000 tokens. Longer prompts reduce Claude's effective context for user content.

Few-Shot Examples

Place examples AFTER the main instruction, not before. Three examples outperform one. Use diverse examples that cover edge cases.

SYSTEM_PROMPT = """
You are a document classifier. Classify the document into one of: invoice, contract, receipt, other.

Examples:
Document: "Payment due by 30 days for services rendered..."
Label: invoice

Document: "This agreement is made between Party A and Party B..."
Label: contract

Document: "Thank you for your purchase. Total: $42.00"
Label: receipt
"""

Chain-of-Thought

Use explicit CoT for reasoning tasks. Add "Think step by step" or "First reason through the problem, then give your answer."

SYSTEM_PROMPT = """
You are a data analyst. When answering questions about data:
1. First, identify what the question is asking
2. List the relevant data points
3. Reason through the calculation
4. State your final answer

Do not skip directly to the answer.
"""

Do NOT use CoT for classification or extraction tasks — it wastes tokens without improving accuracy.

Structured Output

For JSON output, provide the exact schema in the system prompt:

SYSTEM_PROMPT = """
Extract the following fields from the document. Return ONLY valid JSON, no other text:

{
  "date": "YYYY-MM-DD or null",
  "amount": float or null,
  "vendor": "string or null",
  "category": "invoice|receipt|contract|other"
}
"""

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 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. 9d ago First seen · 140 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A b52ed89867ff

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository pyramidheadshark/claude-scaffold (4 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 859 tokens. 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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