Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the set of techniques used to phrase the instructions given to a generative AI model in order to steer its outputs towards the desired quality, reliability and behaviour.

It covers patterns such as few-shot prompting (providing examples), chain-of-thought (forcing the model to reason step by step), structured output (forcing a JSON response), tool availability, the use of system versus user prompts, and explicit handling of failure cases (« if you don't know, say so »).

It is today a cross-cutting skill rather than a job, but a differentiating one: the quality of an AI application depends as much on the prompt as on the underlying model.