AI-Assisted Program Design : An Introduction to Prompt Engineering Using Python and GitHub Copilot

This book presents systematic prompt engineering to foster effective use of coding assistants and AI-based programming. The target audience is anyone that has some programming experience and can read, analyze, and critique code. The thesis behind the book is that prompts are programs. As such, they need to be designed and tested. To this end, the textbook presents novel design recipes for using a coding assistant and for writing prompts. A design recipe is a series of steps, each with a concrete outcome, that provide scaffolding for programming with coding assistants and for writing prompts. The presented design recipes may be applied to programming tasks using any programming language and any coding assistant. Designing prompts solidly place prompt engineering in the realm of science much like designing programs do for software engineering. The textbook is implementation-oriented and throughout every chapter the reader is engaged in software development.