Prompt engineering overview
The canonical vendor guide: clarity, examples, structure and chain-of-thought, straight from the lab.
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How do I write research prompts that get consistently better answers?
The short answer
Good research prompts share four parts: a persona (act as an equity analyst), a precise task with scope and geography, the context you already have, and a required output format. For deep research runs, add guardrails: which sources to prefer, what to exclude, and an instruction to flag uncertainty instead of guessing. Iterate; the second prompt informed by the first answer is where the quality jumps.
A quick orientation. The real value is below: resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it.
18 resources worth your time
Claude prompting best practices
Updated best practices that transfer well to every frontier model, not just Claude.
Open platform.claude.com →Anthropic's Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial
Nine hands-on chapters with exercises; the fastest structured way to level up.
Open github.com →Prompt Engineering Guide (promptingguide.ai)
The free reference 3M+ people learned from, covering zero-shot to ReAct with examples.
Open promptingguide.ai →dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide (GitHub)
The underlying repo with papers, notebooks and lessons for going deeper.
Open github.com →Introduction to Prompt Engineering (DAIR Academy)
A self-paced course version if you prefer structure over docs.
Open academy.dair.ai →Gemini for Google Workspace Prompting Guide (handbook)
Google's persona-task-context-format formula with role-specific examples; effective prompts average 21 words.
Open services.google.com →Google Workspace with Gemini Prompt Guide
The interactive version of the handbook, organised by job and use case.
Open workspace.google.com →Tips to write prompts for Gemini
A two-minute read of prompting basics to share with non-technical teammates.
Open support.google.com →Deep Research Prompt Framework
Names the 8 components of a research prompt including guardrails and anti-hallucination clauses.
Open findskill.ai →Deep Research Prompt Template
A copy-paste template that turns a fuzzy founder question into an analyst brief.
Open armenberenson.com →ChatGPT Deep Research: Prompts inside prompts
The meta-prompting trick: have the model interview you before it researches.
Open linkedin.com →Unlock ChatGPT's Research Superpowers: Guide to Deep Research Prompts
Worked examples of weak vs strong research prompts with the outputs compared.
Open medium.com →Deep research (OpenAI Academy resource)
OpenAI's own training material on briefing the research agent properly.
Open academy.openai.com →Deep Research Prompts
An educator's battle-tested prompt patterns for rigorous, citable research output.
Open teachingnaked.com →Build your personal AI copilot
Shows how a standing system prompt about you and your company upgrades every future research answer.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Your Couch-to-5K for AI
A gentle training plan that builds daily prompting muscle instead of one-off hacks.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Tuning Your AI Model to Reduce Hallucinations
Prompting techniques specifically aimed at getting fewer made-up answers.
Open mediacenter.ibm.com →More in Search & Research
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