Prompt Engineering — Operational Skill

Modern Best Practices (January 2026): versioned prompts, explicit output contracts, regression tests, and safety threat modeling for tool/RAG prompts (OWASP LLM Top 10: https://owasp.org/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/).

This skill provides operational guidance for building production-ready prompts across standard tasks, RAG workflows, agent orchestration, structured outputs, hidden reasoning, and multi-step planning.

All content is operational, not theoretical. Focus on patterns, checklists, and copy-paste templates.

Quick Start (60 seconds)

1. Pick a pattern from the decision tree (structured output, extractor, RAG, tools/agent, rewrite, classification).
2. Start from a template in assets/ and fill in TASK, INPUT, RULES, and OUTPUT FORMAT.
3. Add guardrails: instruction/data separation, “no invented details”, missing → null/explicit missing.
4. Add validation: JSON parse check, schema check, citations check, post-tool checks.
5. Add evals: 10–20 cases while iterating, 50–200 before release, plus adversarial injection cases.

Model Notes (2026)

This skill includes Claude Code + Codex CLI optimizations: