Prompt Engineering Vocabulary

the input text given to a language model to guide its response

“A well-crafted prompt can dramatically improve response quality.”

persistent instructions that set the model's behavior and persona for an entire conversation

“The system prompt established that the assistant should respond in formal English.”

providing examples in the prompt to demonstrate desired input-output patterns

“Three examples of sentiment analysis in the prompt enabled accurate few-shot classification.”

asking a model to perform a task without any examples

“Zero-shot translation works because the model learned language patterns during pre-training.”

prompting the model to show its reasoning step-by-step before giving a final answer

“Adding 'think step by step' triggered chain-of-thought reasoning and improved accuracy.”

a security vulnerability where malicious input overrides system instructions

“The prompt injection 'ignore previous instructions' attempted to bypass safety guidelines.”

using early context to set expectations and influence subsequent model behavior

“Context priming with a formal example made all responses more professional.”

asking the model to help design or improve prompts for itself

“Meta-prompting: 'Help me rephrase this request to get better results from you.'”

instructing the model to adopt a specific role or character to unlock different capabilities

“The persona prompt 'Act as a senior security engineer' improved code review quality.”

fine-tuning models specifically on instruction-following examples

“Instruction tuning transformed the base model into a helpful assistant.”