Prompt engineering is the discipline of writing inputs that produce consistent, useful outputs. The good practices are unsexy but they compound: clear roles ("You are a..."), explicit constraints ("Reply in exactly three sentences"), structured output (XML tags or JSON schema), and few-shot examples.
The biggest mistake is treating prompts as throwaway text. Production prompts deserve the same care as code: version-controlled, tested against a fixed eval set, and changed only with measurement. We've seen teams cut hallucination rates 80% just by adding a structured output template and three good few-shot examples.
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