Prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the craft of formulating instructions to a language model so it returns consistent, precise, and useful answers.
Also known as: prompt design
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing instructions ("prompts") for a language model so it produces the result you want, consistently. It is about giving clear context, precise role descriptions, examples of desired output, and constraints on what the model should and should not do. Good prompt engineering can dramatically improve AI answer quality without changing the model — it is therefore the first layer of effort before considering more expensive options like fine-tuning. For businesses, prompt engineering is also about building reusable templates employees can apply consistently.
Related terms
- LLM (Large Language Model) — An LLM is a large language model trained on enormous text volumes that can generate, summarise, and analyse text in a human-like way.
- Fine-tuning — Fine-tuning is the process of further training an existing AI model on specific data to improve performance for a narrow use case.