The 2025 Guide to Prompt Engineering

Your one-stop solution for mastering the art of prompting to unlock the full potential of AI

Welcome to your ultimate resource for mastering prompt engineering in 2025. This comprehensive guide offers a curated collection of tools, tutorials and real-world examples designed to help learners at every level understand and apply effective prompt engineering techniques.

As generative AI continues to reshape industries, the ability to craft precise prompts for AI models—including large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4, IBM® Granite®, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard, DALL·E and Stable Diffusion—has become a critical skill. Whether you're working with proprietary systems or exploring open source alternatives, prompt engineering is the key to unlocking the full potential of AI-powered tools.

Prompt engineering is the new coding. In a world increasingly driven by machine learning, the ability to communicate with AI-generated systems by using natural language is essential. This guide will help you design, refine and optimize prompts that drive meaningful results—whether you're building applications, automating workflows or pushing the boundaries of creative expression.

From foundational concepts to advanced strategies, this guide is your go-to reference for navigating the evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs), AI prompt design and generative AI (genAI) innovation.

Beyond prompts—designing with context

Crafting better prompts is only the beginning. True expertise in advanced prompting lies in understanding the broader context in which AI models operate—ranging from user intent and conversation history to the structure of training data and the behavior of different models. This is where context engineering becomes essential, enabling you to shape not just what you ask, but how the model interprets and responds.

By leveraging techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), summarization and structured inputs such as JSON, you can guide models toward more accurate and relevant model responses. Whether you're working on code generation, content creation or data analysis, designing with context ensures alignment with the desired output. This approach enhances the performance of LLMs across tasks and improves the reliability of outputs in real-world applications.

Get started with prompt engineering

Dive into the Prompt Engineering Guide with a structured path designed for learners, developers and AI enthusiasts. Whether you're building a chatbot, automating complex tasks or experimenting with AI tools, this guide covers everything you need to master the art and science of prompt design.

Overview

Gain a high-level understanding of prompt engineering, its growing importance in natural language processing (NLP) and how it empowers users to interact with AI-powered systems using high-quality prompts.

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Agentic prompting

Learn how to guide AI agents to take autonomous actions, make decisions and complete multistep or intermediate steps in workflows—ideal for automation and intelligent task execution.

Example-based prompting

Explore few-shot prompting, zero-shot prompting and other prompting techniques to teach large language models (LLMs) by using examples or minimal context, improving problem solving and adaptability.

Multimodal prompting

Discover how to craft prompts that combine text, images and other media to interact with multimodal models like Granite, Gemini, GPT-4o and DALL·E, enhancing AI-generated content creation.

Prompt design

Master the structure of effective prompts by using templates that ensure clarity, specificity and alignment with your goals—crucial for handling user queries and generating accurate responses.

Prompt evaluation

Use qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate prompt performance, including debugging techniques and metrics that ensure consistency and relevance.

Prompt hacking and security

Understand the risks of prompt injection and adversarial attacks and learn how to secure your AI models against vulnerabilities in prompt-based systems.

Prompt management

Organize, document and version your prompts for scalability and collaboration. Manage datasets, track changes and reuse prompts across projects efficiently.

Prompt optimization

Refine and iterate prompts to improve output quality, reduce latency and align model behavior with your objectives—especially useful when working with APIs and training data.

Prompt reasoning enhancement

Boost AI reasoning with structured prompts that encourage chain of thoughts prompting (CoT prompting), self-consistency and tree of thoughts strategies for deeper logical flow.

Prompt tools

Explore a variety of AI tools and platforms that support prompt creation, testing, visualization and deployment—ideal for developers and researchers alike.

Prompt tuning

Go beyond manual prompting by fine-tuning models using prompt-based training for domain-specific tasks, leveraging open source frameworks and curated datasets.

Prompt use cases

Browse case studies and real-world applications of prompt engineering across industries like education, marketing, software development and design.

Prompting techniques

Dive into advanced strategies like chain-of-thought prompting, role-based prompting and self-reflection to unlock the full potential of generative AI and LLMs.

This guide serves as a foundational resource for understanding and applying prompt engineering across a range of AI-driven applications. For those seeking practical, hands-on experience, the IBM.com Tutorials GitHub Repository offers a collection of real-world use cases and step-by-step implementations by using Python, complete with code snippets and structured workflows. This repository is particularly valuable for learners and practitioners aiming to deepen their expertise in prompt design, model interaction and the broader ecosystem of AI tools

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