GLOSSARY
Prompt (Prompt Engineering)
The instruction you give an AI model; prompt engineering is the craft of writing instructions that reliably produce the output you want.
A prompt is whatever you feed an AI model to shape its output: a question, a paragraph of context, examples, a role ('act as an editor'), or all of these at once. Because models generalize from what they read, small changes in wording — specifying audience, format, tone or constraints — can change results dramatically.
Prompt engineering is the discipline of finding instructions that work reliably. Modern tools reduce its importance: ChatGPT and its peers ask clarifying questions, and models increasingly 'reason' before answering. Still, clear intent, relevant context and explicit constraints remain the difference between a mediocre answer and a great one.