# Prompt Engineering

> 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.

- Identifier: PTL-0002
- Category: Foundations
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/prompt-engineering/
- Also known as: prompt design

## 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.

## Narrower terms

- [Context Engineering](https://protologue.com/t/context-engineering/)

## Related terms

- [Prompt](https://protologue.com/t/prompt/)
- [Automatic Prompt Engineer](https://protologue.com/t/automatic-prompt-engineer/)

## Sources

- Schulhoff et al. (2024). The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608
- Anthropic (2024). Prompt engineering overview. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Prompt Engineering. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0002). https://protologue.com/t/prompt-engineering/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)