prompt-engineering-patterns SKILL.md skillA
prompt-engineering-patterns from wshobson/agents is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add wshobson/agents/prompt-engineering-patterns@git:20260707.511f834Pins git:20260707.511f834 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- wshobson/agents
- Path
plugins/llm-application-dev/skills/prompt-engineering-patterns/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 5
- Latest version
- git:20260707.511f834, committed Jul 7, 2026
- First version recorded
- Feb 19, 2026
- Size
- 5,216 bytes
- Repository stars
- 42,320
- License
- MIT
This skill should be used when the user asks to "optimize a prompt", "improve prompt performance", "design a prompt template", "write better prompts", "debug prompt issues", "use chain-of-thought", "structured prompting", "few-shot prompting", or wants to apply advanced prompt engineering patterns for production LLM applications.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Prompt Engineering Patterns Master advanced prompt engineering techniques to maximize LLM performance, reliability, and controllability. ## When to Use This Skill - Designing complex prompts for production LLM applications - Optimizing prompt performance and consistency - Implementing structured reasoning patterns (chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought) - Building few-shot learning systems with dynamic example selection - Creating reusable prompt templates with variable interpolation - Debugging and refining prompts that produce inconsistent outputs - Implementing system prompts for specialized AI assistants - Using structured outputs (JSON mode) for reliable parsing ## Core Capabilities ### 1. Few-Shot Learning - Example selection strategies (semantic similarity, diversity sampling) - Balancing example count with context window constraints - Constructing effective demonstrations with input-output pairs - Dynamic example retrieval from knowledge bases - Handling edge cases through strategic example selection ### 2. Chain-of-Thought Prompting - Step-by-step reasoning elicitation - Zero-shot CoT with "Let's think step by step" - Few-shot CoT with reasoning traces …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add wshobson/agents/prompt-engineering-patterns@sha256:6a210b15be01bc6fThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260707.511f834, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_qwqr65c53jb6s3zl)
6 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 5 versions of this file, between Feb 19, 2026 and Jul 7, 2026, about one every 34 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20260707.511f834 latest | 2026-07-07 | 511f834 | 5,216 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260603.3ce0342 | 2026-06-03 | 3ce0342 | 5,218 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260522.be57c0b | 2026-05-22 | be57c0b | 5,092 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260307.47a5dbc | 2026-03-07 | 47a5dbc | 14,048 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260219.0865571 | 2026-02-19 | 0865571 | 14,435 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (5216 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
wshobson/agents · 42,320 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-11-08 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_qwqr65c53jb6s3zl GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=wshobson/agents/prompt-engineering-patterns GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/6a210b15be01bc6f76a74ec1e46302dee310ddf79d2def63fc9b7c54221fe329
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.