Advanced Prompting

By the end of this lesson you will be able to iterate, chain, and systematically evaluate prompts for complex or high-volume tasks. Advanced prompting moves beyond single interactions into systems engineering. Meta-prompting uses Claude to write or refine your prompts for you. Prompt chaining breaks a complex task into a sequence of smaller steps, where the output of one prompt becomes the input for the next. Systematic evaluation means testing your prompts against a diverse set of realistic test cases to measure performance objectively, rather than trusting a single trial. Worked example: to generate a marketing report, use prompt chaining, ask Claude to first produce an outline, pass that outline to a second prompt to write the draft, and a third to check it against brand guidelines. Then use the Evaluation tool in the Anthropic Console to test the chain against twenty real past reports. Practice task: use meta-prompting. Explain a difficult task to Claude, ask it to write an optimized prompt for you, then test that prompt on three distinct inputs.