Key AI Concepts (3)#

In this chapter, we cover prompt engineering (how to structure questions and instructions) and context engineering (how to provide the background materials the model should use to produce an answer).

Prompt Engineering#

A prompt is the text you give to an AI model as a query (a question or instruction). For example, in ChatGPT, whatever you type into the input box is the prompt. Prompt engineering is the skill of writing prompts in a way that reliably produces the result you want. It may feel like “just typing in a chat box,” but the quality of the output can change dramatically depending on how you phrase and structure the input—so people call it “engineering” because there are principles, trade-offs, and know-how.