AI glossary
Prompt
A prompt is the text you send a language model to tell it what to do: the instruction, any examples, and the material it should work on.
A good prompt says what you want, for whom and in what shape, and gives the model what it needs to do it. "Summarise this" leaves it guessing; "Summarise this bug report in three bullet points for a support engineer" does not.
In code a prompt is usually built from a template with values filled in, and it deserves the same care as other code: kept in version control, tested against fixed examples and changed on purpose.
A common mistake is to fix a bad answer by adding more and more rules. Often the better fix is a clearer task, an example of the answer you want, or less unrelated text in the way.
Learn it hands-on
These free lessons teach it with commands to run in a lab and checked tasks. Read them whole with no account.