AI Vocabulary · 03 Working with AI
What is Prompt?
Everything you send to a model to get a result: your question, instructions, examples and material.
A prompt is the input you give a model. It can be one line ("summarise this") or several pages: a role, a goal, background, examples of good output, the format you want and the material to work on.
Good prompts are less about magic phrases and more about clarity. The model only knows what you tell it, so the question to ask is: what would a smart new colleague need to do this well? The broader term for everything the model sees is context.
Why it matters for you
Most disappointing AI results come from thin prompts, not weak models. Adding the goal, the audience, an example and the constraints usually improves results more than switching tools.
Own it
Write down the prompts that work for your team and reuse them. A shared prompt library is a small asset you own, and it keeps working when you change providers.
Where it comes from
The word comes from the Latin promptus, "brought forth, ready" (Etymonline). In theatre, a prompter feeds actors their next line; in computing, a prompt is the cursor waiting for input. With GPT-3 in 2020, researchers showed that the text you give a model could steer it to do new tasks, and "prompt" became the everyday word for that input (Brown et al., 2020).
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