If you've ever interacted with voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, you've engaged in a basic form of prompt engineering. The way you phrase your request—"Play some relaxing music" versus "Play Beethoven's Symphony"—can yield vastly different results. A *prompt* is natural language text describing the task that an AI should perform. A prompt for a text-to-text language model can be a query, a command, or a longer statement including context, instructions, and conversation history. Prompt engineering may involve phrasing a query, specifying a style, choice of words and grammar, providing relevant context, or describing a character for the AI to mimic. *Prompt engineering* is the process of structuring or crafting an instruction in order to produce the best possible output from a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining prompts—questions or instructions—to elicit specific responses from AI models. Think of it as the interface between human intent and machine output. In the realm of AI, where models are trained on enormous datasets, the right prompt can be the difference between a model understanding your request or misinterpreting it.