Automatic Prompt Engineer
Also called APE.
Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) uses a language model to generate candidate instructions for a task from input-output examples, scores each candidate on held-out data, and selects the best one.
Description
APE discovered a zero-shot chain-of-thought trigger that outperformed "Let's think step by step" on some benchmarks, and framed prompt writing as a search problem that models can solve themselves.
Sources
- Zhou et al. (2022). Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Automatic Prompt Engineer. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0073). https://protologue.com/t/automatic-prompt-engineer/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_automatic_prompt_engineer,
title = {Automatic Prompt Engineer},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0073},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/automatic-prompt-engineer/}
}