Prompt engineering has a bad reputation because most of it is superstition. But underneath the "you are a helpful assistant" cargo-culting, there are a handful of techniques that reliably work — and they're grounded in how the model actually behaves.
Let me separate the real patterns from the folklore. These are the ones that move quality measurably, not the magic phrases people paste around without knowing why.
Why prompting works at all
A model predicts the next token conditioned on everything before it. Your prompt is that condition. So prompting isn't casting spells — it's setting up a context in which the desirable continuation is the most probable one. Every technique below is just a different way of doing that.
The techniques that actually move the needle
