What prompt engineering is

The skill of talking to AI

Prompt engineering is the practice of writing instructions that get a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to produce useful, reliable results. The model is capable; the quality of what you get back depends heavily on how you ask.

A good prompt is clear about three things:

• Task — what you want done.
• Context — the background the model needs.
• Format — how the answer should be shaped.

Learning to control these turns a vague, hit-and-miss chat into a dependable tool you can use for writing, analysis, coding and research.