Prompt

A prompt is what you say to an AI. If you have typed a question into ChatGPT, you have written a prompt. There is nothing technical about it, and you do not need special words or a secret format.

The reason prompts get so much attention is that they make an enormous difference to what you get back. A good way to think about it: the AI is a capable assistant who will do exactly what you ask, but who takes you very literally and cannot read your mind. If you ask for “a summary,” you will get one, but it might be the wrong length, aimed at the wrong reader, or focused on the wrong points. If you ask for “a three-sentence summary for someone who has not read the article, focusing on the main argument,” you get something far closer to what you had in mind.

So a prompt is doing two jobs at once. It tells the AI what task to do, and it gives the context the AI needs to do that task well: who it is for, what style you want, and what a good answer looks like.

You do not need to get prompts perfect on the first try. Working with AI is a back-and-forth. You ask, you see what comes back, and you refine. Learning to write prompts that get you there faster is one of the most useful skills you can pick up, and it is what our Prompt Craft guides are all about.