What a Prompt Is

Part of the Prompt Engineering course

You have probably typed into a chat box before: asked a question, gotten an answer, maybe been surprised by how good or how wrong it was. This course teaches you to get reliably good answers on purpose, but first you need the handful of words everyone in this field uses to talk about what just happened. This lesson is that vocabulary.

A large language model (often shortened to LLM, or just called "the model") is a program that takes in text and writes back text. That is the entire interface: a text box where you type, and an area where a reply appears. Nothing about how it works on the inside is visible to you, and for this lesson, nothing about the inside matters yet.