Course Review: roadmap.sh's Prompt Engineering Roadmap

If you've been wondering what all the buzz is about around prompt engineering (or even asking, "lol, is this actually a thing?"), LLM's, and AI in general, then roadmap.sh's Prompt Engineering Roadmap is a great place to start. Here's my concise review of the course.

Summary

The course covers the basics: what a LLM is, what prompt engineering is, why it's needed, and strategies. It's a course you can go start-to-finish in a couple of hours, unless you're like me and want to read every link and watch every video. But it's essentially a lighter, visual wrapper around Learn Prompting, which is where you'll want to go if you know you want to improve your prompt engineering skills.

Relevance to the Industry: 9/10

  • Prompt engineering jobs aren't plentiful, but knowing how to write effective prompts can be a huge advantage in your career
  • It's a skill that's becoming increasingly important as AI becomes more prevalent in our lives
  • It's a future-proof skill since people will always need to guide AI

Scope: 7/10

  • Covers the majority of topics (that I'm aware of) related to prompt engineering
  • Does not cover image generation (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion)
  • Does not cover model differences (GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4 vs LLaMA)
  • Does not cover LangChain or other LLM frameworks

Technical Depth: 7/10

  • It's a great start for beginners, but it's not a deep dive
  • Missing examples for the majority of topics
  • Suggested reading for each topic almost always links to Learn Prompting and no other resources
  • Does cover the pitfalls of prompt engineering and strategies to avoid them

Hands-on Coding: 2/10

  • There are no hands-on coding exercises
  • Does not cover how to run the examples it does have
  • Requires you to copy-paste code snippets into ChatGPT

Quality of Code Examples: 6/10

  • The examples are covered well, but again, it's essentially just Learn Prompting's content
  • But the code snippets do not wrap, so they're almost unreadable unless you copy them into an editor
  • For some reason, it doesn't cover all of Learn Prompting's content, so you'll have to go there to see the rest

Community Support: 10/10

  • roadmap.sh's platform asks users to submit links to resources, so it's constantly evolving
  • roadmap.sh is open-source, so anyone can contribute
  • roadmap.sh has a Discord server with 700+ members

Updates: 3/10

  • Need to go to GitHub to see when the last update was made
  • The roadmap was created May 19th, 2023, and since then has only had 9 updates in over 3 months
  • Given that it's an evolving field, I would expect updates much more frequently

Final Verdict: 6/10

  • Take it if you're looking for an intro into prompt engineering
  • If you want a proper course on prompt engineering, go to Learn Prompting

That's it, folks. Hope this helps you decide whether this course is your jam or not. Cheers!