Prompt and prompting

A prompt is the text you give a model to tell it what you want. Prompting is the craft of writing that text well. This may sound trivial, but folder 02 shows it is not: the way you phrase a request can change not only what the model says but how hard it thinks. Asking "what is the answer?" and asking "let's work through this step by step" can produce very different results from the exact same model. Much of early reasoning research was the discovery that good prompting unlocks abilities that were already latent in the model.