Development · Term
Prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of writing model instructions that produce reliable, reviewable results — specifying the outcome, the context, the constraints, and the exact output format.
The label overstates the craft. Most of what works is ordinary specification discipline: state the outcome before the background, supply the real source material, name the constraints, and define the structure you want back. Vague briefs produce vague output faster than before, not better output.
In production the durable version of this is not clever wording but stable structure — a fixed instruction, a schema for the response, and a fixed evaluation set that tells you when a model update has changed behaviour underneath you.
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