Prompt engineering
The craft of phrasing your request just right to coax out a better answer.
Think of it like
Knowing how to Google well — a real skill that quietly becomes second nature.
Example
“Think step by step, then answer” reliably beats just asking — a classic prompt-engineering move.
How it actually works
Once a hot job title, it’s cooling not because it’s useless but because it’s diffusing into everyone’s baseline. The heavy lifting moved to context and tools; the exact wording matters far less than it did back in 2023.
For product teams
Wording requests well for better output — a fading standalone skill as models read intent better.
For engineers
Structuring prompts (instructions, examples, format constraints) to steer the output distribution.
Related
- Chain of thought — Overlaps heavily with chain of thought.
- Cooling as models get better at reading plain intent.
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