---
published: true
id: prompt
title: Prompt
description: Knowledge captured in João Lopes' learning graph.
tags:
- ai-engineering
- llm
locale: en
resource: https://joaolopes.dev.br/knowledge/concepts/en/prompt/
created: '2026-03-28'
---

# Prompt
Text input provided to a language model that conditions its response, including user messages, system prompts, and any other context.

## Definition
A prompt is any text the model receives as input — a user message, a system prompt, tool results, or conversation history. The model produces a response conditioned on the prompt and the rest of the context. In agent systems, the user's message is one prompt among many: the system prompt, tool results, and conversation history all form the full input the model reasons over.

## Source
- [Prompt Engineering — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering)

## Related
- [LLM](/concepts/en/llm.md)
- [Model](/concepts/en/model.md)