Elements of a Prompt

As we cover more and more examples and applications with prompt engineering, you will notice that certain elements make up a prompt.

A prompt contains any of the following elements:

Instruction - a specific task or instruction you want the model to perform

Context - external information or additional context that can steer the model to better responses

Input Data - the input or question that we are interested to find a response for

Output Indicator - the type or format of the output.

You do not need all the four elements for a prompt and the format depends on the task at hand. We will touch on more concrete examples in upcoming guides.