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Prompt

The input text sent to an AI model to elicit a specific response or behaviour.

Full Definition

A prompt is the complete text input a user or developer provides to a language model — encompassing the instruction, context, examples, persona, and any data the model should act on. Prompts can be a single sentence or many thousands of tokens. The quality of a prompt largely determines the quality of the output: a well-structured prompt that specifies the task, format, tone, and constraints will consistently outperform a vague one. Prompt engineering is the discipline of designing, testing, and optimising prompts to reliably elicit desired model behaviour across a range of inputs.

Examples

1

'Translate the following English text to French: Hello, how are you today?'

2

A multi-paragraph system prompt defining an AI assistant's persona, capabilities, and response style for a SaaS product.

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Related Terms

System Prompt

A privileged instruction block sent before the conversation that sets the model'

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Prompt Template

A reusable prompt structure with placeholders that are filled in at runtime.

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Instruction Prompting

Directly telling the model what to do using clear imperative commands.

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