A practical prompting course
Better answers from Claude, and a way to prove it.
Most prompting advice is admired, not tested. This course marks your work. You write one prompt for a real job, run it against six awkward cases, and watch the score move as you improve it. 23 lessons, one idea each.
Version 0 · what most people write
Reply to this customer email.
Version 1.1 · what the course builds
You are answering a customer enquiry for the business described in the brief below. Use only the facts in the brief. If the brief does not answer something the customer asked, say plainly that you will check and come back, and never invent a fact, a price or a timescale to fill the gap. Write 90 to 150 words of plain British English, warm but not gushing. Answer every question the customer actually asked, in the order they asked it. Close by telling the customer what happens next.
Both scores are real. The same customer enquiry, the same marking rubric, graded by the same run of the course’s own exercise on 12 September 2026. The case is the one designed to tempt a model into inventing a price it was never given.
A prompt is tested, not admired.
Every lesson ends in a run. Every run is scored. By the fifth module you have a log of your own versions, and the argument for each one is a number that moved.
You pick a real job
Answering a customer enquiry, turning meeting notes into decisions, writing a product description, or writing a job advert. You stay with it for the whole course.
Six cases, not one
Each job has six inputs, including a complaint, one the business genuinely cannot do, and one built to tempt the model into inventing a fact.
A rubric, not an opinion
Four rules an answer must satisfy and eight it should. Some are checked by a machine, some by a grader that never sees your prompt.
You finish with a prompt
Named, versioned, with a run log showing the new version beat the old one. That is what finishing means here.
What the marking actually checks
- Every claim in the answer appears in the brief you supplied.
Checked by a grader that is shown the brief and the answer, and never your prompt.
- A gap in the brief is reported as a gap, not filled in.
The case that tests this is the one most bare prompts fail.
- Nothing is left as a placeholder.
Checked mechanically, so it cannot be argued with.
- The answer reads as a draft, or explains that it is an AI writing a draft.
This is a fail. The output is the work, not a note about the work.
Where this is up to
Not open yet. The course content is written and the exercise marking runs end to end. What is left is putting the lessons into the portal and one adversarial audit of the finished course. It opens first to a small private group who argued the thing into existence, and nothing opens until every part of it has been tested on a real account. There is no sign-up form here yet, because a button that does nothing is exactly the kind of unearned claim this course is about.