Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining instructions (prompts) to guide large language models (LLMs) toward producing useful, relevant, and accurate outputs. A prompt is the input text or question you give to an AI model, and its quality directly affects the AI's response.

Prompt engineering is essential because LLMs respond to the instructions they are given. Clear, well-structured prompts help the AI understand your intent.

Example of an effective prompt:

• Summarize the main points of the following article in three bullet points;
• List three benefits of regular exercise for adults;
• Rewrite the following sentence to make it more formal;
• Generate a Python function that calculates the factorial of a number.

Example of a poor prompt:

• Tell me about this;
• Explain;
• Write something interesting;
• Code it.

The first set of prompts is specific and clear, while the second set is vague and may lead to unfocused responses.