Prompt Engineering in Python, with GPT, and the OpenAI API

About this course

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Master the art of prompt engineering in Python and unlock the full potential of GPT models and the OpenAI API. This course will teach you how to create, improve, and fine-tune prompts for various tasks, from personal coaching to building chatbots. You'll gain hands-on experience in iterative prompt design, mitigating hallucinations, and extracting structured information with JSON mode. The course begins with an introduction to prompt engineering fundamentals and explores how GPT models work in practical scenarios. You'll learn to set up your OpenAI API key, implement chain-of-thought prompting, and compare model versions like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Through real-world examples, you’ll also tackle advanced topics such as emotion-driven prompts and exponential backoff strategies. In later modules, you'll build your own Python API chatbot, enhance multi-turn conversations, and use GPT for extracting numerical values and image-based input. Techniques like "prompt hacking" and smart prompting will teach you how to maximize GPT’s performance, even with older models. This course is ideal for developers, data enthusiasts, and AI professionals seeking to master prompt engineering. Basic Python knowledge is required, and the course is designed for an intermediate difficulty level.

Course objectives

• understand the fundamentals of prompt engineering
• learn how to set up and use the OpenAI API
• explore techniques to enhance multi-turn conversations