Abstract
Prompt engineering has emerged as a critical skill for software developers, yet traditional learning methods struggle to support its evolving, interactive, and context-dependent nature. This paper introduces Prompt Coach (PC), an agentic tutor that aids developers in crafting high-quality code-generation prompts through Socratic guidance embedded within their IDE.
PC evaluates prompt quality across multiple dimensions and surfaces targeted questions to guide self-correction, grounded in the developer's codebase and the behavior of the target LLM.
We present an early empirical study with 15 professional developers, combining quantitative prompt quality scoring with qualitative perception measures. Participants showed statistically significant improvements after a single 60-minute session, with the largest gains in dimensions often overlooked by developers.
They also reported strong trust, high adoption readiness, and unanimous agreement that PC improved their prompt-writing skills.
Blogger's Review: Prompt Coach combines intelligent tutoring with a real-time development environment, offering an unprecedented learning experience for developers. Its contextual feedback mechanism and self-correction guidance not only enhance learning efficiency in prompt engineering but also boost developers' confidence and skills. In the future, such AI-integrated learning tools may lead a new revolution in the software development field.