Claude Code Prompt Engineering Workflow: How I Stopped Wasting Tokens and Got 10x Better Results

Cross-posted for the DEV.to community. For the first three months I used Claude Code, my prompts were a mess. I'd type a sentence, get back something close to what I wanted, type a correction, get something else, and burn through tokens correcting things I should have specified upfront. My output was inconsistent, my context window filled up with noise, and I blamed the model when the problem was on my side of the keyboard. Then I started treating prompts like code. I version them, I review them, I iterate on them deliberately, and I keep a library of patterns that work.