In partnership with

Ever watched a master locksmith at work? With the slightest adjustment of their tools, they can transform a stubborn lock into an open door. Prompt engineering works the same magic with AI.

It's not about waving a wand or reciting incantations. It's the art of precision – knowing exactly which words will guide an AI from mechanical responses to brilliant insights. With the right prompting techniques, you can coax an AI into delivering razor-sharp accuracy, engaging in natural conversation, and staying firmly anchored to reality.

Think of it as having a conversation with a brilliant but extremely literal friend. Every word matters. Every instruction shapes the response. And when you master this craft, you'll transform basic AI interactions into powerful tools for problem-solving, creativity, and innovation.

There’s no shortage of paid courses, degrees, tutorials, — even complete university programs. Anyone with $10 worth of knowledge is currently trying to resell their techniques for $100.

But fear not! The Internet in reality is an enchanted forest from a video game of the 90s — is full of hidden treasures waiting to be discovered. I’ve ventured there to identify the best free prompt engineering resources, from beginner incantations to advanced conjuring for text, code and AI artistry. My quest? To democratize the magic and make prompt craft available to all. Let’s dive in!

1. OpenAI‘s Prompt Engineering Best Practices (Beginner)

2. Fast & Free Prompt Engineering Course with Cheat Sheets (45 min) (Beginner, Intermediate)

3. Guide to Communicating with Artificial Intelligence (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)

4. Vanderbilt University: Prompt Engineering Video Course for ChatGPT (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)

5. Prompt Engineering Guide (Intermediate, Advanced)

6. DeepLearning.AI: Prompt Engineering Video Course for Developers (Intermediate, Advanced)

7. Advanced Course on Prompt Engineering (yes … Advanced)

8. OpenAI: Cookbook ChatGPT, Dall-E, Whisper (Advanced)

9. AI Art prompting: The DALL-E 2 prompt book (Beginner, Intermediate)

10. AI Art prompting for MidJourney (Beginner, Intermediate)

Your daily AI dose

Mindstream is the HubSpot Media Network’s hottest new property. Stay on top of AI, learn how to apply it… and actually enjoy reading. Imagine that.

Our small team of actual humans spends their whole day creating a newsletter that’s loved by over 150,000 readers. Why not give us a try?

Click here to subscribe

☝️ Support PM Tech House by clicking the link above to explore our sponsors!

1. OpenAI: Prompt Engineering Best Practices

Straight from the ivory tower of the ChatGPT developers, this beginner prompting tutorial helps to lay a solid foundation for prompt design. Step-by-step, it guides novices through techniques including:

• Separating instructions from content

• Learning to use specific, descriptive language

• Defining the desired output format

• Zero-shot vs. one-shot, few-shot prompting

• Say what to DO instead of what NOT to do

• Using leading words

Example:

This prompt course offers a good start covering the absolute basics. Many of you will already know quite a few of these best practices.

🎓: Beginner
⏰: About 10–15 min
📙: Text, examples

2. Maximilian Vogel: (Fast &) Free Prompt Engineering Course

This course squeezes in the most critical prompt techniques into a 45 minute lesson. I’ve also added two handy cheat-sheets to help you design your own prompts.

The ten most important techniques to write prompts:

You’ll learn the 10 most important techniques for crafting effective prompts, such as:

1. Clear instructions

2. Defining the output format

3. Prompt templates

4. Data context

5. Few-shot examples

6. How to deal with “don’t know” / “won’t answer” cases (ie. controlling hallucination / critical topics)

7. Chain-of-thought prompting

8. Conversation history

9. Formatting the prompt: Headlines, labels, delimiters

10. The anatomy of a professional prompt

🎓: Beginner, Intermediate
⏰: 15 min reading, 30 min studying the examples
📙: Text, cheat sheets, examples

3. Learnprompting.org: Your Guide to Communicating with Artificial Intelligence

Many, many & more prompting techniques and examples. Including an introduction to generative AI, ChatGPT and prompt engineering and more.

The beginner section alone covers:

• Basics

• Introduction to AI

• Prompting With ChatGPT

• Prompt Engineering

• Learning Prompting Embeds

• Giving Instructions

• Role Prompting

• Few-Shot Prompting

• Combining Techniques

• Formalizing Prompts

• Priming Chatbots

• OpenAI Playground

🎓: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: 1–2 days for the beginner section, while the rest is better used as reference or source of inspiration.
📙: Text, examples, interactive prompting (bring your own API key)

4. Vanderbilt University: Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT

Free Course of 3 weeks. Tests and certificates are USD 49.-
This comprehensive 3-week course led by Jules White starts at square one and methodically builds up prompt engineering expertise.

Some topic highlights include:

• What is a prompt?

• Prompt patterns

• The Persona pattern

• Root prompts

• Question refinement patterns

• Cognitive verifier patterns

• Audience persona patterns

• ReAct prompting

🎓: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: 3 weeks with 6 hrs each
📙: Video, examples in ChatGPT playground, scripts, references to research papers

5. Elvis Saravia: Prompt Engineering Guide

This comprehensive guide dives deep into prompt engineering and draws on research papers and tests with openAIs text-davinci-003 models.

It covers a wide range of techniques, including:

• Prompt basics & elements

• Techniques such as zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, self-consistency, tree-of-thoughts

• Applications: program-aided LLMs, generating data & code

• Model lists and discussions

• Risks in prompt engineering

• Relevant research papers

🎓: Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: A few hours for the intro. Weeks for the rest - best used as a reference.
📙: Text, examples

6. DeepLearning.AI & OpenAI: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers

This set of nine comprehensive and excellent video-based courses teaches prompt engineering for coders, by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng. Registration is necessary. Although tailored towards software engineers, anyone can use many of the inspirations to directly prompt in playgrounds. A basic knowledge of Python may help to understand the examples. Free for a limited period, but could soon be behind a paywall.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction

• Guidelines

• Iterative Approach

• Summarizing

• Inferring

• Transforming

• Expanding

• Chatbots

• Conclusion

🎓: Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: Around 90 min to watch, a few days to play around with the examples
📙: Video lectures, Jupyter notebook examples

7. Cameron R. Wolfe: Advanced Prompt Engineering

“When few-shot learning is not enough”. This advanced material tackles really interesting approaches and are not for bread-and-butter prompt magicians who need to generate simple answers. It deals with complex prompts that require multi-step processes to generate correct answers.

Cameron shows us techniques such as:

• Least-to-most technique

• Self Consistency

• Multimodal chain of thought (CoT)

• Knowledge Augmentation

• Automatic Prompting

🎓: Advanced
⏰: Text, examples, research paper references
📙: 2 hours

8. OpenAI: Cookbook

This expansive cookbook has tons of good examples of prompts used in software engineering tasks. And it’s not only for the language models, but also for Whisper and DALL-E. Sidenote: A basic knowledge of Python is required to understand the code.

Content:

• API Usage

• GPT

• Embeddings

• Apps

• Finetuning

• Dall-E

• Whisper

• Azure OpenAI

🎓: Advanced
⏰: Weeks — can be used both as a reference and a source of inspiration
📙: Code, repositories, Jupyter notebooks, explanations and introductions

9. DALL-E 2 prompt book

A real digital book with pages to turn! It offers a short introduction to AI art prompting, along with thousands of prompt snippets you can use to define an image. Many of them work with models other than Dall-E as well.

🎓: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: Days — can be used as reference and source of inspiration
📙: Explanations, images and prompt examples

10. James Bachini: Advanced MidJourney Prompt Engineering

Course with text & images & video course. While other tutorials are more general, here James Bachini delves deep into AI art prompting specifically for MidJourney. This means it contains a lot of commands like “- -ar 3:2“ „- - stylize“, which may not work at all on other models.

James introduces Midjourney prompting with topics such as:

• Commands

• Tips and tricks

• Flags

• Styles

• Referencing artists

🎓: Intermediate, Advanced
⏰: 1–2h
📙: Text, prompt & image examples as well as a youtube video.