Prompt
The input you give a model. The word covers more than the question you type.
A prompt is everything the model receives as input for a turn: your question, the instructions around it, the files, the tool schemas, the conversation so far. Engineers often talk about "the prompt" as if it were only the sentence in the chat box, but the model sees all of it.
This is why two teams can send the same sentence and get different results: their surrounding context differs. It is also why good prompt work is less about magic wording and more about removing ambiguity about what the model should do, what it may use, and what a good answer looks like.
Related terms
System Prompt
The standing instructions a harness sends on every request.
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing instructions a model follows reliably.
Context Window
Everything the model sees on one request. Finite, and it decides what fits.
Few-shot Prompting
Showing the model two or three examples of the task instead of describing it.
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