prompt-engineering-patterns
This skill should be used when the user asks to "optimize a prompt", "improve prompt performance", "design a prompt template", "write better prompts", "debug prompt issues", "use chain-of-thought", "structured prompting", "few-shot prompting", or wants to apply advanced prompt engineering patterns for production LLM applications.
Profile →npx skills add wshobson/agents --skill prompt-engineering-patterns --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Prompt Engineering Patterns Master advanced prompt engineering techniques to maximize LLM performance, reliability, and controllability. ## When to Use This Skill - Designing complex prompts for production LLM applications - Optimizing prompt performance and consistency - Implementing structured reasoning patterns (chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought) - Building few-shot learning systems with dynamic example selection - Creating reusable prompt templates with variable interpolation - Debugging and refining prompts that produce inconsistent outputs - Implementing system prompts for specialized AI assistants - Using structured outputs (JSON mode) for reliable parsing ## Core Capabilities ### 1. Few-Shot Learning - Example selection strategies (semantic similarity, diversity sampling) - Balancing example count with context window constraints - Constructing effective demonstrations with input-output pairs - Dynamic example retrieval from knowledge bases - Handling edge cases through strategic example selection ### 2. Chain-of-Thought Prompting - Step-by-step reasoning elicitation - Zero-shot CoT with "Let's think step by step" - Few-shot CoT with reasoning traces - Self-consistency tec
- When to Use This Skill
- Core Capabilities
- 1. Few-Shot Learning
- 2. Chain-of-Thought Prompting
- 3. Structured Outputs
- 4. Prompt Optimization
- 5. Template Systems
- 6. System Prompt Design
- Quick Start
- Detailed patterns and worked examples
- Best Practices
- Common Pitfalls
- Success Metrics
What does the prompt-engineering-patterns skill do?
This skill should be used when the user asks to "optimize a prompt", "improve prompt performance", "design a prompt template", "write better prompts", "debug prompt issues", "use chain-of-thought", "structured prompting", "few-shot prompting", or wants to apply advanced prompt engineering patterns for production LLM applications.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add wshobson/agents --skill prompt-engineering-patterns --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From wshobson/agents, a repository with 38,479 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.