Week 2 — Prompt Writing & Spec Documents

Excel is deterministic; an LLM is not. A careful specification is what makes a non-deterministic tool reliable.

Lab 2 and HW 2 are due Tuesday, May 26, 11:59 PM Mountain.

Lecture

• From Prompt to Spec — interactive lecture
  The Week 2 lecture as an interactive deck. Work through the slides; each one is reinforced with a key concept and a self-check question.

Lab

• Lab 2 — Direct an AI to Clean a Dataset
  The three-part lab: clean a messy journal-entry file by hand, write a specification and direct an AI to build a cleaning script from it, then have the AI explain the script back to you.

References & tools

• Encoding primer
  What UTF-16 and text encodings are, and why the raw lab file looks the way it does.
• pandas primer
  A step-by-step walkthrough of what the data-cleaning script does.
• Output validator
  Check your cleaned CSV against the expected result before you submit.
• Pivot table practice tool
  Build pivot tables interactively to prepare for HW 2.
• Specification template GITHUB
  The five-section spec template you fill in for Lab 2, Part 2.