Prompt engineering — Simon Willison's weblog (topic index)

BlogApr 21, 2026

Original excerpt

The subtle art and craft of effectively prompting and building software on top of LLMs.

Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it’s always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models.

Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a quite a lot of work done in a single shot.

First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.

I ge…

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