Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the technique of wording the requests you make to an AI so it answers with what you need. Learning to ask for things well is necessary, but less and less as a separate discipline full of formulas: today's models understand a clear request written in normal language pretty well.

A few years ago it made sense as a separate discipline: models understood less, got lost with long requests and there were tricks that genuinely changed the result. That has changed, and what's confusing today is the sheer number of templates, "magic prompts" and paid packs still doing the rounds as if nothing had happened. What's left of value from that discipline fits in a few lines (context, goal, an example and the format of the result) and you don't need to pay for a course to learn it. There are no secret words that open doors.

This is one of those topics where I try to take the mystery out of something that's sold as magic. How I learned to ask AI for things I explain in "Asking AI for things without magic formulas", and why prompt engineering is on the list of things I review I explain in "What's no longer worth learning".