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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

006·340

prompt engineering

/prɒmpt ˌɛndʒɪˈnɪərɪŋ/ - n.

1 [colloq.] Writing the requirements doc you skipped, one sentence at a time, into a text box.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The practice of structuring instructions, context, and examples to steer a model toward reliable outputs.

Evidence
See also
  • agentic systemsSoftware empowered to act on decisions no human had been assigned to make.
  • context windowA budget the organization fills with everything except the one document that decided the matter.
  • guardrailsRules that enforce a policy, written for the policy the org has not yet enforced anywhere else.
  • retrieval-augmented generationA pipeline that retrieves the company's contradictory documents and asks the model to sound certain about all of them.