What is a prompt

A prompt is the message or instruction you write to an AI to get it to do something: a question, a command or a piece of text with directions. It's an English word that Spanish speakers use as is; the closest equivalents would be "instruction" or "request". Every time you type into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, you're writing a prompt, even if you don't call it that.

It sounds like a technical term, but it isn't. The prompt includes everything you give the AI at that moment: your text and also whatever you attach, such as a document or an image. What almost nobody knows at first is that, in many tools, there are also instructions you can't see: the maker or the app gives the model some prior directions before your message arrives. And "prompt engineering" sounds like a profession, but to get started all you need is to write clearly and give context.

Prompts show up in almost everything I write about on the blog, because they're how you talk to any AI. In "Are chats still useful?" I talk about when typing into a chat window is enough for me and when it isn't; in "Can I build a business that pays me a salary?" you can see them used in a real case; and in "Asking AI for things without magic formulas" I explain how I've learned to write them better.