Recipes
The 2026 Prompt Engineering Cheat Sheet (For People Who Ship)
A terse, production-first prompt engineering cheat sheet for 2026: fifteen patterns, each with a one-line rule, its failure mode, and a link to the full recipe.
5 min read25
Category
Recipes
10 posts in this category.
Recipes
Role Prompting: 5 Recipes That Ship (2026)
Five paste-ready role prompting recipes for 2026: domain expert, audience, format contract, adversary, and voice, each with its failure mode.
3 min read34
Recipes
Chain of Thought Prompting: 5 Examples That Ship (2026)
Five paste-ready chain-of-thought prompting examples for 2026, each with its failure mode, plus when reasoning out loud makes the answer worse.
3 min read39
Recipes
Prompt Chaining: 5 Recipes That Ship (2026)
Five paste-ready prompt chaining recipes for 2026: extract-then-reason, draft-critique-rewrite, route, map-reduce, and generate-then-gate, each with its failure mode.
3 min read44
Recipes
Meta Prompting: 5 Recipes That Ship (2026)
Five paste-ready meta prompting recipes: make the model write, critique, rubric, and template your prompts, each with its failure mode. Plus the honest part: when meta prompting just wastes tokens.
3 min read39
Recipes
Prompt Injection Defenses That Hold Up (2026)
Four prompt-layer defenses against prompt injection that measurably help, three that are theater, and the one architecture rule that actually keeps you safe. With paste-ready prompts and each failure mode.
4 min read42
Recipes
Few-Shot Prompting Recipes That Ship (2026)
Five copy-paste few-shot prompting recipes for July 2026: lock output format, tone, labels, and edge cases. Each with the prompt and the exact case where it breaks.
3 min read64
Recipes
Claude Extended Thinking: 3 Recipes That Ship (July 2026)
Extended thinking changed in July 2026: on Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 you use adaptive thinking and effort, not budget_tokens. Three recipes and the gotchas.
3 min read59
Recipes
Claude Prompt Caching: 3 Recipes That Pay Off, 2 That Lose Money (June 2026)
Three Claude prompt-caching recipes with real cost math for Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7, and Haiku 4.5. Plus two patterns where caching quietly costs you 25% more than not using it.
6 min read73
recipes
Claude Structured Output: 3 Prompt Recipes That Ship (June 2026)
Three production-grade Claude structured output recipes for June 2026. Invoice extraction on Sonnet 4.6, support triage on Haiku 4.5, NL to SQL on Opus 4.7. Real cost per call. Three failure modes the docs do not warn you about.
7 min read68