What is a prompt?

If you read the previous page, you’ve already written one.

A prompt is what you give the AI to work with. A question, a request, instructions, a document you paste in, a photo you upload, or any combination of those. Whatever you send it is the prompt.

The word comes from the idea of prompting someone: giving them something to respond to. It sounds technical. It isn’t.

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What counts as a prompt

All of these are prompts:

• A question. “What does ‘escrow’ mean?”
• A request. “Write a thank-you note to my neighbor for watching the dog.”
• A request with material. “Summarize this,” followed by a pasted article.
• A photo with a question. A picture of a warning light on your dashboard, and “What does this light mean?”
• A follow-up. “Shorter.” That one word is a prompt too, because it’s what you gave it next.

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You don’t need to be good at “prompting”

You may see courses and job titles built around “prompt engineering,” the practice of carefully writing and testing prompts. That matters for people building products on top of AI, who need the same instruction to work reliably thousands of times.

It isn’t a skill you need before you start. A clear request in plain words, like the four parts on the previous page, is enough to begin, and a follow-up fixes a lot of what the first try missed.

What makes a prompt good isn’t a trick. It’s the same thing that makes a request to a person good: saying what you need, giving the facts, and saying what you want back.

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Two kinds you’ll run into

The message you type. Everything above.

Standing instructions. Many AI apps let you save instructions that apply to every conversation, such as “I’m a nurse, keep explanations practical” or “Always use US spelling.” Apps call these different things: custom instructions, personalization, preferences, or a project’s instructions. They’re still prompts. You write them once instead of every time.

Businesses that build a chatbot often write standing instructions you never see, telling it how to behave. That’s one reason the same AI can act differently in different places.

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Something you can try

Send the same request two ways and compare.

First:

Write a birthday message.

Then, in a new conversation:

Write a short birthday message for my aunt, who is turning 70 and
loves gardening. Warm but not sappy. Two or three sentences.

The difference between the two answers is the whole lesson. The tool didn’t get smarter. You gave it more to work with.

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Something important to know

Anything you put in a prompt is sent to the company that runs the app. That includes documents you paste and photos you upload. Before you include something, check whether it contains details the task doesn’t need, like names, account numbers, or someone else’s information. The last page in this series shows how.

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If it doesn’t match what you see

You can’t find a place for standing instructions. Not every app has one, and they move between versions. Look in settings for words like “personalization,” “instructions,” or “customize.” If it isn’t there, paste your instructions at the start of the conversation instead.

Someone tells you there’s a secret prompt that unlocks better answers. There’s no universal one. A prompt that works well for someone else works because it fits their task. Yours needs to fit yours.