A prompt is the request sent to an AI for one piece of work. A person can type it or choose it from a saved list. It says what work the AI should do, with any material provided for the task. The request joins that material and any standing instructions in the AI's context.
A planner is considering moving Keith Brennan's old personal pension. The provider's four-page reply to the firm's questions goes into the AI product with a shared prompt: "Summarise this letter in five bullet points." The summary covers the transfer value, fund, charges, exit charge and retirement age. It omits a guaranteed annuity rate on page three. The planner writes in a draft suitability report that the plan has no guarantees. Compliance checks the provider's reply before sign-off and finds the guarantee.
The prompt asked for a short summary, without saying it was for a possible pension move or asking about guarantees. A better request would name that purpose and ask what the provider says about guarantees and protected tax-free cash. The answer would still be the AI's reading of the letter. The planner checks those points in the provider's reply before using them in advice; a more specific prompt does not prove the summary is complete.
Not to be confused with
- A person types or chooses a prompt for a piece of work. When a product uses standing instructions, it may send them with requests without showing them to the person asking. Vendors sometimes call them the system prompt.
- The context is everything the AI is given for the work. The prompt is one part of it.
- A prompt on a shared list, sometimes called a prompt library, keeps the request's wording or structure consistent. The AI can still answer it differently each time.
- In back-office software, a prompt can mean a message the software shows a person, such as a reminder that a review is due. An AI prompt goes the other way: a person gives it to the AI.
Overheard
PrincipalShould we take the five-bullet prompt off the shared list?
PlannerRewrite it. It should say the summary is for moving a pension and ask about guarantees and protected tax-free cash by name. Even then, I'll read the letter before anything goes in the report.
Where it sits
Prompt
- is part ofContext
- works withHarnessInstructionsNon-determinism
Grey words are still being written.
Sources
Last reviewed
- 1Prompting best practicesAnthropic, Claude Platform documentation ·
- 2Prompt engineeringOpenAI, API documentation ·
- 3Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long ContextsLiu et al., Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics ·
- Status
- Reviewed
- Named reviewer
- None recorded
