Prompt engineering is the skill of writing clear instructions for an AI. You do not need to pay for it. This free study outline takes about four weeks.

Week 1: The building blocks

• Goal, context, format and tone: the four parts of a good prompt.
• Practise by rewriting five weak prompts into strong ones.

Week 2: Examples and steps

• Show the AI one or two examples of what you want.
• Ask it to work in steps for harder tasks.

Week 3: Checking and improving

• Ask the AI to review its own answer and list what could be wrong.
• Compare two prompts for the same task and keep the better one.

Week 4: A real project

• Build a small prompt library for one job, with a note on what each prompt is for.
• Test every prompt on new examples and fix the weak ones.

Start with our guide to writing better AI prompts, and use our 20 prompts for practice.