Prompt Engineering Tournament Results & What We Learned

PromptLayer hosted a prompt engineering tournament with three rounds: handling AI PR disasters (safety/refusal), answering book-based homework questions accurately, and building a financial advisor prompt using RAG. Key takeaways include growing developer preference for Claude over OpenAI, the effectiveness of creative formatting (XML/pseudo-code, few-shot examples), and the continued relevance of classic prompting techniques like chain-of-thought, role play, and dos/don'ts lists. Example winning prompts are shared for each category.