The AI Prompt Engineering Playbook: Techniques That Actually Work

Disclosure: This post contains links to products I created. See details below. I've written thousands of prompts across production systems — from internal tools at a major tech company to AI products used by thousands of developers. Most prompt engineering advice online is either too basic ("be specific!") or too theoretical to apply. Here's what actually works, with real examples you can use today. The Foundation: Structured Prompts Beat Clever Prompts The single biggest improvement you can make to any prompt is adding structure. Not cleverness. Not jailbreaks. Structure. Before (unstructured): Help me review this code and find bugs and also suggest improvements and make sure it follows best practices. After (structured): ## Task Review the following code for issues. ## Review Criteria 1. Bugs: logic errors, off-by-one, null handling 2. Security: injection risks, auth gaps, data exposure 3. Performance: unnecessary loops, missing indexes, N+1 queries ## Output Format For each issue fo