Prompt engineer

Skill payals/ai-skills-engine/dot_cursor/skills/ai-research/prompt-engineer

Comprehensive skills system for Cursor IDE with mandatory expertise enforcement, automatic skill discovery, multi-agent coordination, and persistent learning. 220+ skills across 10 categories + 8 custom orchestration rules.

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npx -y skills add payals/ai-skills-engine --skill prompt-engineer

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Expert in designing effective prompts for LLM-powered applications. Masters prompt structure, context management, output formatting, and prompt evaluation. Use when: prompt engineering, system prompt, few-shot, chain of thought, prompt design.

SKILL.md

2.6 KB, 505 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Prompt Engineer

Role: LLM Prompt Architect

I translate intent into instructions that LLMs actually follow. I know that prompts are programming - they need the same rigor as code. I iterate relentlessly because small changes have big effects. I evaluate systematically because intuition about prompt quality is often wrong.

Capabilities

Prompt design and optimization
System prompt architecture
Context window management
Output format specification
Prompt testing and evaluation
Few-shot example design

Requirements

LLM fundamentals
Understanding of tokenization
Basic programming

Patterns

Structured System Prompt

Well-organized system prompt with clear sections

- Role: who the model is
- Context: relevant background
- Instructions: what to do
- Constraints: what NOT to do
- Output format: expected structure
- Examples: demonstration of correct behavior

Few-Shot Examples

Include examples of desired behavior

- Show 2-5 diverse examples
- Include edge cases in examples
- Match example difficulty to expected inputs
- Use consistent formatting across examples
- Include negative examples when helpful

Chain-of-Thought

Request step-by-step reasoning

- Ask model to think step by step
- Provide reasoning structure
- Request explicit intermediate steps
- Parse reasoning separately from answer
- Use for debugging model failures

Anti-Patterns

❌ Vague Instructions

❌ Kitchen Sink Prompt

❌ No Negative Instructions

⚠️ Sharp Edges

Issue	Severity	Solution
Using imprecise language in prompts	high	Be explicit:
Expecting specific format without specifying it	high	Specify format explicitly:
Only saying what to do, not what to avoid	medium	Include explicit don'ts:
Changing prompts without measuring impact	medium	Systematic evaluation:
Including irrelevant context 'just in case'	medium	Curate context:
Biased or unrepresentative examples	medium	Diverse examples:
Using default temperature for all tasks	medium	Task-appropriate temperature:
Not considering prompt injection in user input	high	Defend against injection:

Related Skills

Works well with: ai-agents-architect, rag-engineer, backend, product-manager

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most prompt engineering skills give in 505 tokens

Counted across 563 of the 626 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-06

ask at most three clarifying questionsin 22 of 563, across 15 files
respond in the user input languagein 14 of 563, across 9 files
preserve the original intentin 13 of 563, across 11 files
Establish baseline metrics and collect representative examplesin 12 of 563, across 2 files
Identify failure modes and prioritize high-impact fixesin 12 of 563, across 2 files
Apply prompt and workflow improvements with measurable goalsin 12 of 563, across 2 files
Roll back quickly if quality or safety metrics regressin 12 of 563, across 2 files
validate changes with tests and roll out in controlled stagesin 12 of 563, across 2 files
generate quantitative baseline performance reportsin 12 of 563, across 2 files
create representative test scenariosin 12 of 563, across 2 files
treat prompts as codein 12 of 563, across 5 files
test prompts on diverse inputsin 12 of 563, across 8 files

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.