Technology & AI
What is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt engineering is the craft of writing instructions for LLMs that produce more consistent, accurate, well-formatted responses.
Proven techniques: role-setting ("you are an expert in..."), few-shot (examples before the question), chain-of-thought ("think step by step"), structured output (JSON schema), and XML tags for organization.
Guiding principle: prompts are programming in natural language. The more specific (context, constraint, format), the less room the model has to "improvise" and err.
Frequently asked questions
Is a long prompt better?
Up to a point. More context helps, but excess pollutes and triggers "lost in the middle". Direct + specific beats verbose.
Same prompt in different models gives different result?
Yes. Each model has bias. Production prompts ideally are tested/tuned per model.