Principles for Prompt Engineering - Karina Nguyen (Claude Instant @ Anthropic)

Summary

• Karina Nguyen (Anthropic, worked on Claude self-correction and hallucination reduction) frames prompting as creative writing — hypothesis-driven iteration, not luck.
• Three reasons prompting fails: humans know what they want but not how to ask, vaguely know, or don't know at all; few-shot examples fix the middle case.
• Six writing principles: Clarity, Conciseness, Coherence (context first, task last), Consistency, Direction (style/length guidance), Grounding (quote sources).
• Claude was originally fine-tuned on XML tags — using <user_query>, <answer> etc. consistently materially improves Claude performance over other formats.
• Demos Claude as a recommendation system over a CLIP image-text database with zero-shot relevance scoring in answer tags.