Prompt engineering is the skill of phrasing your requests so an AI gives you what you actually want. It ranges from simple habits — adding context, specifying a format, giving an example — to more advanced techniques like breaking a task into steps or asking the model to "think" before answering.
You do not need to be a programmer to do it. Most of the value comes from being clear and specific: state the goal, provide the relevant facts, describe the audience and tone, and say what a good answer looks like. Iterating — tweaking the prompt after seeing a result — is a normal and expected part of the process.
Related terms
Prompt · Large Language Model (LLM)