# What is Prompt Engineering?

The practice of designing the text of prompts sent to a language model to improve the quality, format, or reliability of its output.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/prompt-engineering/
Last updated: 2026-04-17

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Prompt engineering focuses on how instructions are phrased. Context engineering, by contrast, focuses on what information the model has access to. For production AI systems, the bottleneck is almost always context, not phrasing. Prompt engineering remains useful for output shaping and tool-use scaffolding, but it cannot compensate for missing or stale data.

## Related terms

- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)
- [context-window](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-window/)
- [ai-agent](https://usewire.io/glossary/ai-agent/)