Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting meaningful input that helps a language model produce useful responses. Effective prompts are clear, specific, concise, grammatically correct, and supported by examples when appropriate. Poorly specified input increases the risk of poor output. section 1.5.2
Treat prompting as an iterative development skill rather than a one-shot request. A financial-balance example progresses from generated code to a function, type hints, and a function that returns a formatted string instead of printing it. Each refinement states a more precise software requirement. section 1.5.2
A practical prompt should:
- State the desired behavior clearly and specifically. section 1.5.2
- Keep the request concise and use correct grammar and spelling. section 1.5.2
- Include examples when they clarify the expected response. section 1.5.2
