what is prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the process of designing, writing, and refining input instructions (called "prompts") to guide generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as large language models (LLMs), to produce accurate, relevant, and high-quality outputs. A prompt is a natural language text or instruction that requests the AI to perform a specific task, such as answering a question, summarizing a text, generating images, or translating languages. Because AI models are open-ended and sensitive to the context provided, carefully engineered prompts help the AI understand the user's intent and generate meaningful responses rather than vague or irrelevant ones. Prompt engineering often involves trial and error, using creativity to format prompts with the right words, context, examples, or constraints so that the AI's response meets the desired criteria. It also includes techniques like breaking down complex tasks into smaller parts, rephrasing instructions, or guiding the AI to reason through steps. The importance of prompt engineering has grown with the rise of generative AI, as it bridges the gap between users and AI models, making AI applications more effective, efficient, and user-friendly. Prompt engineers create prompt templates or libraries tailored for different scenarios that application developers can reuse to ensure consistent, relevant AI outputs. In summary, prompt engineering is the art and science of communicating precisely and thoughtfully with AI systems to unlock their full potential and get the best possible results from them. It is a key skill for working with modern AI technologies. This definition and explanation is synthesized from several authoritative sources describing prompt engineering, including AWS, GeeksforGeeks, Coursera, and Wikipedia, among others.