AI Prompt Engineering

Most prompts fail for the same handful of reasons. This book teaches you to fix all of them.

You already know how to use AI. You have typed plenty of questions into ChatGPT, asked Claude to draft an email, had Gemini summarize a document. You are past "wow, this is cool" and into "why won't it just do what I want?" That is the phase where most people quietly give up - and the phase this book is built for.

This is a prompting book, not a product book. The techniques work across every major AI platform because they are rooted in how large language models actually process language, not in the quirks of any single product. The product guides teach you to drive specific cars. This book teaches you to drive.

What's inside:

• Foundations. Why most prompts fail, how AI models process your words, and the universal anatomy of a great prompt. Specificity as a superpower - the single highest-leverage skill in prompting.

• Core techniques every serious user should master. Few-shot prompting. Chain-of-thought reasoning. System prompts and instructions. Structured output (JSON, tables, schemas). Persona and voice control.

• Advanced methods. The iterative prompt - how to converge on great output instead of starting over. Prompt chains and pipelines. Negative prompting. Context window management. Multimodal prompting (images, audio, mixed inputs).

• Domain applications. Prompting for code, for writing, for analysis, and for creative work - each with worked examples and the patterns that consistently outperform generic prompts.

• Mastery. Testing and evaluating prompts like a real practitioner. Building and maintaining a prompt library that scales with your work and your team. Platform-specific tricks for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The future of prompting in an agentic world.

• 50+ reusable prompt patterns, cross-platform comparison tables, a glossary, and curated further reading in the appendices.

Every example was tested on real platforms - ChatGPT (GPT-5.3, GPT-5.4 Thinking, GPT-5.5), Claude (Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7), and Gemini (3 Pro, 3 Flash, 3.1 Pro). The book is honest about non-determinism: the patterns are reliable even when individual outputs vary.

If you are still typing "please" and "thank you" to AI just in case - this book will teach you to spend those tokens on results instead.

Includes coverage of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, structured output, agentic prompting, and every 2026 platform's quirks.