prompt

A prompt is the input that tells a generative model what to do by providing instructions, context, examples, templates, and constraints. It can be plain text, a structured message, or a multimodal mix of text with images, audio, video, or documents.

Prompts can include task descriptions, examples, retrieved passages, schemas for outputs, tool call hints, and safety or policy guidance. In chat-style systems, messages may be organized by roles such as system and user prompts to set behavior and intent.

Effective prompts are specific, unambiguous, and formatted to match the model and task. Their quality can be evaluated by how well the resulting outputs meet the desired criteria.

Related Resources

Tutorial

Prompt Engineering: A Practical Example

Learn prompt engineering techniques with a practical, real-world project to get better results from large language models. This tutorial covers zero-shot and few-shot prompting, delimiters, numbered steps, role prompts, chain-of-thought prompting, and more. Improve your LLM-assisted projects today.

intermediate ai data-science

For additional information on related topics, take a look at the following resources:

• Practical Prompt Engineering (Quiz)