Prompt Engineering
Also called prompt design.
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.
Sources
- Schulhoff et al. (2024). The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques.
- Anthropic (2024). 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/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_prompt_engineering,
title = {Prompt Engineering},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0002},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/prompt-engineering/}
}