prompt-engineering

Effective prompt engineering is fundamentally about closing two gaps between human intent and model behavior. Understanding which gap you're dealing with determines whether prompt refinement will actually solve your problem.

This gulf separates what you mean from what you actually wrote in the prompt. Your intent — the task you want the LLM to perform — is often only loosely captured by the words you write. Specifying tasks precisely in natural language is surprisingly hard.

Even prompts that seem clear often leave crucial details unstated. For example:

Use this skill when crafting, reviewing, or improving prompts for LLM pipelines — including task prompts, system prompts, and LLM-as-Judge prompts. Triggers include: requests to write or refine a prompt, diagnose why an LLM produces inconsistent or incorrect outputs, bridge the gap between intent and model behavior, reduce ambiguity in instructions, add few-shot examples, structure complex prompts, or improve output formatting. Also use when the user needs help distinguishing specification failures (unclear instructions) from generalization failures (model limitations), or when iterating on prompts based on observed failure modes. Do NOT use for general coding tasks, document creation, or non-LLM writing. Source: maragudk/evals-skills.