DL.AIHands-on reviewedEditor's pick
DeepLearning.AI
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
For: Developers writing their first LLM-powered feature
Beginner · ~1.5 hours (9 lessons) · Free
Best prompt engineering courses (2026)
The shortlist for learning to prompt LLMs in 2026 — separated by whether you're a developer or not.
Prompt engineering as a "career" peaked in 2023 and has since evolved into an integrated skill — engineers prompt LLMs as part of normal coding, marketers prompt them as part of normal writing, PMs prompt them as part of normal spec-writing. Almost nobody hires a dedicated "prompt engineer" anymore, but everybody needs to be one.
The implication for courses: don't take a 30-hour "Prompt Engineering Bootcamp" course. The field doesn't justify that depth. Take the 90-minute Anthropic interactive tutorial (free), the DeepLearning.AI ChatGPT prompting course (free), and call it done. The remaining skill is built by writing prompts daily against your real use case, not by absorbing more theory.
The one paid option we recommend below is for non-developers who want the Google Sheets variant of Anthropic's course — same content, no code, runs in a spreadsheet. For developers, free is the right answer.
Pre-requisites
Before taking these courses, make sure you understand: Prompt engineering, Chain of thought, Few-shot learning, System prompt.
Recommended courses (2)
Filter all prompt engineering courses →AHands-on reviewed
Anthropic
Anthropic Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial
For: Anyone whose primary LLM is Claude (or who builds with Anthropic API)
Beginner · ~9 chapters (3-6 hours) · Free
Frequently asked questions
Is prompt engineering still a real career in 2026?+
Not as a dedicated job title. The skill has been absorbed into adjacent roles — engineers, PMs, marketers, writers all prompt LLMs as part of their normal work. Job postings for "Prompt Engineer" peaked in 2023; the few that remain are at frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI) or are mislabeled "AI Solutions Engineer" roles.
What's the fastest way to get good at prompting?+
Spend two hours on the Anthropic interactive tutorial (free), then prompt LLMs daily for 30 days against real work. Theory ceilings out fast; the rest is reps. Keep a personal "prompt library" of patterns that worked — that's where the compounding lives.
Do I need to learn prompting separately for Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini?+
Most patterns transfer across models — structured prompts, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought — but each model has quirks. Claude is unusually responsive to constitutional framing and XML-style tags; GPT models reward explicit step-by-step instructions; Gemini is the best at long-context retrieval. The Anthropic and OpenAI vendor courses cover their quirks; we recommend learning one well, then transferring.
Related agents & tools
Once you've learned the concepts, these are the agents and tools where the skills pay back.
Want a sequenced curriculum instead of one-off courses?
Browse learning paths →