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Building with Anthropic Claude: Prompt Workshop with Zack Witten
Takeaway
Iterative prompt engineering with structured XML context and a test-case eval harness in the Anthropic Console produces measurably better Claude outputs than vibe-based editing.
Summary
- Live prompt-doctoring workshop from Anthropic's Zack Witten using the Anthropic Console with audience-submitted prompts (uploaded via a Slack channel).
- Recommends XML tags over Markdown because Claude was trained on more XML; capitalization and grammar fixes empirically help, typos hurt.
- Demonstrates the Console Evaluate tab to batch-run multiple test inputs and compare outputs side-by-side as prompts are iterated.
- Tactical fixes shown on a medication-reminder agent prompt: enforce 1-sentence outputs, add availability info to context, use prompt variables in double-bracket format.
prompt-engineeringclaudeanthropic-console
Original description
BRING YOUR PROMPTS -- we will workshop them live! No yapping, no slop, just writing, testing, and editing prompts. Let's see how many we can get through! Got prompts that aren't working quite the way you want them to? Bring 'em here and we'll see what we can do! You'll want to also bring a couple specific examples they misbehave on. Don't expect many slides -- this will be one hour of nothing but writing/editing prompts. Intro Speaker - Jamie Neuwirth, Head of Startup Sales, who will share notes on building with Claude and working with Anthropic. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Jamie Jamie Neuwirth, based in San Francisco, CA, US, is currently a Head of Startup Sales at Anthropic, bringing experience from previous roles at Anthropic, Stripe and Google. Jamie Neuwirth holds a Political Science, Entrepreneurship and Management at The Johns Hopkins University. With a robust skill set that includes Social Media, Microsoft Office, Research, Cloud Computing, PowerPoint and more. Jamie Neuwirth contributes valuable insights to the industry. About Zack Machine Learning Engineer with a special interest in NLP and biology.