Prompt
A prompt is the text sent to a language model to tell it what to do.
What it tells you about a developer
Prompt engineering on a profile is worth a follow-up about production prompts: ones that are versioned, tested, and maintained as models change. That work sits closer to writing careful specifications than to chatting with a model.
A prompt is called that because it prompts the model, meaning it cues a response, the same word used for an actor's cue. A prompt can be a single question or a long set of instructions plus background information. Writing an effective prompt is its own skill, often called prompt engineering, and developers who build AI products spend real time refining the prompts their software sends automatically, rather than one-off questions typed by hand.