Prompt
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A prompt is the message you send to an AI to get it to do something. 'Write me a poem about JavaScript' — that's a prompt. The quality of your output is almost entirely determined by how well you write your prompt, which is why there's a whole job called 'prompt engineer' now.
Real Talk
A prompt is the input text provided to an LLM to elicit a desired response. Prompts can include instructions, examples (few-shot), context, personas, and output format specifications. The model generates a completion based on the probability distribution conditioned on the prompt tokens.
When You'll Hear This
"Tweak the prompt until the output looks right." / "The prompt is leaking into the response somehow."
Related Terms
Context Window
A context window is how much text an AI can 'see' at once — its working memory.
LLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM is a humongous AI that read basically the entire internet and learned to predict what words come next, really really well.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI so it actually does what you want.
System Prompt
A system prompt is the secret instruction manual you give the AI before the conversation starts. It sets the personality, rules, knowledge, and behavior.
Token
In AI-land, a token is a chunk of text — roughly 3/4 of a word.