Prompt
The text you feed a language model to steer its response — your question, your instructions, and any examples or context you include. It's the entire input the model reads before it writes a word.
Think of It Like This
The prompt is the brief you hand a contractor: vague in, vague out.
Everything the model knows about your request lives in the prompt: the task, the tone, any rules, and any reference material you paste in. Small wording changes can swing the output a surprising amount, which is why writing good prompts is a real skill rather than an afterthought. When the answer needs facts the model never saw in training, you stuff those facts into the prompt yourself — the core move behind retrieval-augmented generation.