part one

Part 1 Foundations

Before you can engineer a prompt, you need a clear idea of what a prompt actually is.

Part 1 sets that foundation. Chapter 1 reframes the prompt as an engineered artifact: something you design, review, and maintain like the rest of your code. It also introduces the prompt engineering lifecycle and the mental models the rest of the book builds on.

By the end of this part, you will look at a prompt the way you look at a function: as something with a shape, a purpose, and a failure mode you can reason about.