Anthropic - Claude Certified Developer - Foundations Study Guide

6: Prompt and Context Engineering

This chapter turns a chosen model into dependable application behavior through two disciplines that sit above raw API mechanics: shaping what enters the context window and shaping how instructions and examples are phrased. It covers context budgeting, drift prevention, isolation, and cross-session memory; then instruction clarity, example count, placement, refinement, and input screening; then the production handling of what Claude returns through structured outputs, validation, defensive parsing, and calibrated skepticism.