Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the process of structuring natural language inputs (known as prompts) to produce specified outputs from a generative AI model. Context engineering is the related area of software engineering that focuses on the management of non-prompt and prompt contexts supplied to the GenAI model, such as system instructions, metadata, API tools and tokens. It can also be defined as the practice of designing and refining input instructions given to a generative AI model to produce more accurate, relevant, or useful outputs. Effective prompt engineering involves understanding how a model interprets language, and may include techniques such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and role assignment. During the 2020s AI boom, prompt engineering became regarded as a business capability across corporations and industries. Employees with the title prompt engineer were hired to create prompts that would increase productivity and efficacy, although the individual title has since become less common amid AI models that produce better prompts than humans and corporate training in prompting for general employees. Common prompting techniques include multi-shot, chain-of-thought, and tree-of-thought prompting, as well as assigning roles to the model. Automated prompt generation methods, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), provide for greater accuracy and a wider scope of functions for prompt engineers. Prompt injection is a type of cybersecurity attack that targets machine learning models through malicious prompts.