Techniques & Methods
Prompt
A prompt is the instruction, question, or context fed to an LLM to elicit a desired output. Prompts can range from a simple question to complex structured instructions including role definitions, constraints, examples, and output format requirements.
The design of prompts directly determines output quality. Small changes in phrasing can significantly affect accuracy, format, and tone, making prompt design a critical step in deploying LLMs in production applications.
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Related Terms
Techniques & Methods
Prompt Engineering
The discipline of designing input text — instructions, examples, constraints, and context — to reliably steer a language model toward accurate, well-formatted, and intent-aligned outputs without modifying model weights.
Techniques & Methods
System Prompt
Internal instructions that guide an AI model's behavior, tone, and response style.
Techniques & Methods
Few-Shot Learning
Model's ability to generalize from only a handful of labeled examples.
Techniques & Methods
Chain-of-Thought
A prompting and reasoning technique in which a language model is encouraged to produce step-by-step intermediate reasoning before its final answer — empirically improving accuracy on multi-step problems, especially math, logic, and code.