The prompting docs got consolidated

Here is the thing that will bite you before any exam question does: the prompting documentation was restructured, and most of what people quote at you online describes the old layout.

There used to be roughly ten separate pages, one per technique. Be clear and direct had a page. Use examples had a page. XML tags had a page. Chain of thought had a page. People bookmarked them, cited them, built courses on them.

They are gone. Not deleted, but not pages either. Twelve legacy slugs now 308-redirect into anchors on a single consolidated page: claude-prompting-best-practices.

What the docs actually say now

The docs are blunt about it. Their own words: "All prompting techniques are covered in Prompting best practices. That's the living reference; start there."

A 308 is a permanent redirect, which is the strongest signal the web has for "this thing moved and is not coming back". Twelve of them pointing at one page is not a tidy-up. It is a decision that the technique-per-page taxonomy was the wrong shape.

The order of the page is the lesson

This part is worth memorising, because the order tells you what the docs think matters most.

Model-specific first. Four pages: Fable 5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8. Before any general principle, they want you looking at advice for the specific model you are calling. That is a real change in emphasis and we spend a whole lesson on it.

Then General principles, which is where the classic material lives: be clear and direct, add context, use examples effectively, structure with XML tags, give Claude a role, long-context prompting, and model self-knowledge.

Then, in order: Output and formatting (which contains the migration guidance for prefilled responses, and that one is a trap we cover in Module 3), Tool use, Thinking and reasoning, Agentic systems, Capability-specific tips, and Migration.

The generator you cannot use any more

While you are updating your map: the Prompt Tools API is gone. generate, improve and templatize are fully delisted, and the URL now 307-redirects to a stub.

If you learned prompting from material written eighteen months ago, you may have "call the improve endpoint" filed as a real workflow. It is not. The only surviving generator is a Colab metaprompt notebook, which is a notebook, not an API you can call from a service.

This is exactly the kind of thing an exam likes, because it separates people who read the docs this quarter from people who read them once and cached the result. The trap answer is always "deprecated but working", because that is the polite decay everyone expects. Delisted is not deprecated.