AI Glossary Term
What does “Prompt Engineering” mean?
Definition
Designing prompts to improve output quality, reliability, and controllability.
How Prompt Engineering works
Example
A team wants a model to extract invoice totals. They begin with a short instruction, notice it sometimes returns extra text, then add an example and a rule to output only a number, and re-test on a set of sample invoices.
Why it matters
Careful prompts can improve reliability without retraining. Testing them on realistic examples is what makes the work rigorous rather than guesswork.
Common questions
Is it a real skill?
It involves clear writing, task decomposition, and systematic testing, which can be learned.
Do prompts transfer between models?
Not perfectly. A prompt tuned for one model may need adjustment for another.
What are common techniques?
Giving clear instructions, providing examples, asking for step-by-step reasoning, and specifying the output format.