{
  "id": "prompt-engineering",
  "code": "PTL-0002",
  "term": "Prompt Engineering",
  "aliases": [
    "prompt design"
  ],
  "category": "foundations",
  "definition": "Prompt engineering is the practice of designing, testing, and iteratively refining prompts so that a language model reliably produces the desired output for a task.",
  "description": "It covers the wording of instructions, the choice and ordering of examples, output formatting constraints, and the decomposition of a task across multiple calls. As models and tooling matured, much of this work broadened into context engineering, which treats the whole information environment around a model call as the object being designed.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [
    "context-engineering"
  ],
  "related": [
    "prompt",
    "automatic-prompt-engineer"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques",
      "authors": "Schulhoff et al.",
      "year": 2024,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608"
    },
    {
      "title": "Prompt engineering overview",
      "authors": "Anthropic",
      "year": 2024,
      "url": "https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/prompt-engineering/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Prompt Engineering. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0002). https://protologue.com/t/prompt-engineering/"
}