Writing Prompts That Survive Contact With Users
A prompt is a program written in natural language, and the first version never survives real input. This course covers the practical prompt engineering for production — versioning, adversarial inputs, the few-shot set that earns its place, and the eval that tells you when a change regressed — that distinguishes a demo from a feature you can ship and keep.
Why this gap matters now
Demand signals we detected:
- prompt-fragility complaints up 210%
- jailbreak/regression incidents recurring
- sparse content on prompt engineering for production vs demos
What you'll learn
- Treat the prompt as versioned code — An unversioned prompt means every change is an unobserved regression, and when the feature breaks next week nobody can find what changed.
- Few-shot earns its place, it doesn't pad it — Few-shot examples are the most expensive tokens in your prompt and the most often cargo-culted.
- Plan for the input you didn't expect — Real users send inputs the demo never imagined: empty strings, pasted documents, other-language text, and deliberate adversarial phrasings.
- The regression eval that guards every change — Every prompt change — a phrasing tweak, a new example, a model swap — can regress a class of inputs that worked before.
Who it's for
Engineers and PMs shipping LLM features to real users, 1–5 yrs.
Start learning
Read the full micro-course and earn a certificate of completion: Writing Prompts That Survive Contact With Users.
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