My Review of a Prompt Engineering Course
My company paid for the course, so I took it without any financial burden, but honestly, it was less impressive than I expected.
It covers the basics (role assignment, providing examples, step-by-step reasoning), but that's the kind of thing that's already all over free resources. In the end, what matters isn't the course—it's getting a feel for it by using it directly in your own work.
So these days I'm just constantly testing and tweaking prompts for my own tasks. That works much better.
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ㅇㅈ, grinding through it yourself beats lectures, for real
Where can I find the free resources? I’d like to check them out too.
I was in a similar boat. I took something similar as an in-house training last year, but all the instructor's examples were about writing marketing copy, so none of it fit my team's work. In the end, what helped most was spending a month reworking about 30 of the prompts I use and making a few templates of my own. A lecture only gives you the map—you have to do the actual driving yourself.
Well, that's a bit much. It's easy to trash a lecture, but beginners don't even have a clue what 'role assignment, examples, and step-by-step thinking' are, so the organized content itself is valuable, isn't it? If you, as someone who already knows this, say it's not great, there's no way to argue with that.
Specifying the output format (JSON, tables, length limits) has a much bigger perceived impact than assigning a role. Just changing this one thing dramatically reduces variation in the results. If a course doesn’t cover this, honestly, it’s only half the story.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Good thing it was company money lol. If I’d paid for it myself, my review tone would’ve been a lot harsher. But I agree with the conclusion. I’ve also realized, now that I’m on my third course, that prompts aren’t really documents—they’re logs of repeated experiments. If you keep all your failed prompts too, later they show why they didn’t work, and that becomes an asset.
Isn't that old news? These days, setting up tools and context seems more important than writing long prompts, so if the lecture curriculum was straight out of 2023, it's no wonder it was underwhelming.
Haha, so in the end, it all comes down to grunt work. The lecture is just the catalyst that gets you started on that grunt work.